The Orange Blossom Express

by Marlena Evangeline

  “I’ve been thinking of that,” said Maggie, moving a soapy plate under a stream of water that ran in the other side of the double aluminum sink and put it in the dish drainer.

  “Good,” said Lucy, sipping the coffee and thinking she would like a girl baby next because she already had a boy baby and that after that it wouldn’t matter because she would just take what came, but of course she’d take what came anyway, but she could imagine and see if she could direct the force of what might be coming and she thought at that point in her life that she might be able to do that but that was after she’d been in jail and before she’d started thinking other things about the life she was just starting to live and naturally she wanted to think all the best things about it; why wouldn’t she, this was a new big house she had just moved into and why would she think anything but good things about it.

  “I’m gonna have four or five,” Lucy said, thinking about a swarm of children with sticky peanut butter fingers holding rocks and shells and little petaled flowers.

  “They need to eat, you know,” said Mary. “Babies need to eat, and go to school, and have clothes, lots of clothes and shoes and hair cuts and doctors and all the millions of things that babies need.”

  “You had five, mom,” said Lucy thinking of the younger brothers and sisters and knowing that they would have all the things her mother talked about because it was her energetic mother speaking these things.

  “Yes darling, true, and daddy has worked hard to support you guys and so have I, and we were lucky because we’ve been able to do it, you know.”

  “Well I’ll be just like you then, don’t you think, mom?” she asked, her eyes glowing like the soft-flames on beeswax-candles.

  “Of course darling, you will, and you have Gary, that’s true,” and Mary didn’t say all the things she was thinking because her beautiful daughter sat right before her on the threshold of life thinking only perfect things about the whole thing and wanting all of it all and everything the future had to offer because it was the future and not the past or the pain of it and because of that Mary smiled and tousled the girl’s hair and leaned over and kissed her and knew that Lucy would do what she would do and needed to do and that her job was mostly over in that Lucy didn’t need her in the same way but Mary knew Lucy still needed her and always would but that the baby decision wasn’t hers, it was Lucy’s and Gary’s, and that was the family that needed to make it. “But,” she couldn’t help but adding and sounding like a mother because of it but figuring it was okay because she was a mother, “you have to think about college and medical bills and all the other stuff.”

  “Oh Mom,” said Lucy rolling her eyes to Maggie who, knew the sound of Lucy’s voice exasperated, and agreed with the exasperation but who also agreed with Mary.

  “They’re like drugs, darling,” said Mary, as if she were reading Lucy’s very own unspoken thoughts from the moment before but taking them from her realm of consciousness or unconsciousness whatever it happened to be although it wasn’t entirely important but taking those thoughts from her daughter and putting them right there in the air for Lucy to hear from another direction.

  “I’ve thought that,” smiled Lucy feeling for the first time a shared addiction with her mother.

  “What are you guys talking about?” asked Maggie, wondering as she sank the blue ceramic bowl she had made into the water and swished a wash cloth inside it to rinse away the residue of banana and orange.

  “That once you have one baby you keep wanting more like a drug.”

  “Ha,” said Maggie, thinking it was rather or very funny. “I’d heard,” she added, “that God made them exceptionally cute because they were so much trouble and if they weren’t so cute we wouldn’t want all the bother.”

  “You made that up, Maggie, because you don’t like to change diapers,” said Lucy, laughing.

  “I don’t think so. I think that I’ve heard that,” said Maggie thinking about whether she thought it or not but thinking that she didn’t really think it because she wouldn’t mind being bothered with something other than guys and dishes, her usual source of bothersomeness. So thinking she heard it but allowing for the possibility of thinking it herself since her thinking sprang the most unusual things at the oddest times: thoughts sprung like twisty little thistles springing thoughts to life and floating them away on her own webs of spidery consciousness like plankton floating on air currents to some desolate charred cinder of an island hoping to be the seed that life would spring from but most often simply springing.

  “They are cute,” agreed Mary, thinking of cute babies.

  “You don’t ever have to wonder about what to do, Maggie. It’s already decided from the moment you get up, even before, when you think you should sleep; a baby is always telling you what it is you need to do. You can quit thinking. Completely. And just react to the things you need to do. You know. Cook. Eat. Clean. The basic stuff. Survival.”

  “That’s for me,” said Maggie, wondering how many babies it would take to still the thoughts inside her mind. A million. A zillion. How many babies will it take? Instinctively knowing that the mind inside her own particular head would get her into trouble, was getting her into trouble as she was thinking what she was thinking and wondering if a baby would keep this mind at bay like a pack of dogs treeing a thought, arresting it, stopping it within her own imagination as she imagined it. But she thought she must be imagining things and that she wouldn’t be so greatly lucky as to be able to quit thinking these thoughts as she thought them.

  “I’m surprised to hear you say that, Maggie,” said Mary, knowing that Maggie valued her thoughts and the way she thought them but not excluding the fact that she could have a baby none-the-less and be happy with both her thinking and a baby.

  “I’m kidding, in funny sort of way,” said Maggie, not thinking anything she said was funny or amusing but simply the clothes of her thought. As if she couldn’t quite get the right fit. She kept trying all the patterns that other people lent her but they were not right and she’d have to walk around in clothes that were too tight or needed another dart or a seam or a tuck or two or another opening here or there. One of these days, she thought, she’d have to make her own pattern. Something comfortable. Which day? When are you going to do this Maggie? When? When? When?

  “Maybe you could work for mom,” suggested Lucy. “That’s a good idea, isn’t it, Mom? Maggie lives pretty close to you.”

  “Sure, I’d be glad to have Maggie join the firm.” Mary was surprised she hadn’t thought the thought before, but then Maggie had never expressed any interest in business so maybe she didn’t have it.

  “I don’t know,” said Maggie, thinking about bikinis and selling them and if they interested her and deciding that they certainly didn’t but it might be a good thing to have a job and make her own money rather than just room and board like she got at home. Was that the deal with all marriages? Lucy was getting room and board, but Lucy liked that not having to work in the world but having her work out of the world in this nice house with big windows that let enough world in to satisfy Lucy and that might satisfy me too thought Maggie, maybe in another life but not this life that didn’t quite fit but then she was wearing Hank’s pattern. No wonder. She stuck her hand down in the sink and pulled the plug because she had too many dishes to wash and the water was dirty and she rinsed the sink and put in fresh soap and new warm water so she could wash the rest.

  “I couldn’t take a job right now,” she answered. “Not really.”

  “Let me know if you change your mind,” said Mary. “You might think about it. You could take a job. Do something with all that good thinking.”

  It wasn’t that Mary disliked Hank. Hank was nice and charming but he seemed less available to Maggie than a husband should be and because of that she sensed a problem, not that she could have put a finger on it. She knew she could not, but she hadn’t even seen them together at this party, not once and she instinctively knew a problem existed though Magg
ie didn’t exactly say there was a problem and Mary thought that Maggie might not even know exactly or hadn’t exactly come to the reality of the problem and that she had to hit it head on sooner or later whatever the problem the collision was inevitable because there were two trains going in different directions on the same track.

  Maggie put the tea-kettle on the stove and turned on the burner thinking she might like to sip on a little tea while she finished up and glanced out the window, seeing Hank talking and laughing with Rebecca.

  What was it she wondered that intrigued him with that girl and of course she could see all the things and knew she didn’t have the same kind of personality which didn’t bother her because she surely only wanted to be herself but she sensed that whatever her own self might be it would never be enough for Hank because he always saw the best parts of other people and the worst parts of her own self and always told her without reservation what her multitude of faults were, things she had never known to be faults until she became married to Hank. Rebecca was this incredible athlete, a long distance runner, or something, something entirely demanding and focused and fulfilled. Not only that, she was very good at it and Maggie always felt like this dolt around Rebecca because she was so good at what she did and had so much to say about it when all Maggie had to talk about was what she did at home and what nice antiques she had bought or something like it which seemed okay but evidently wasn’t okay because it only seemed so, it really wasn’t so, not for Maggie not then not that day or any of the other days she’d been having lately and so she knew that seeming so wasn’t always so it seemed. She noticed she’d gotten dishwater all over her pretty blouse and that it didn’t seem so pretty anymore and she stood for a minute staring at Hank having this great time with Rebecca while she stood there getting ready to go back to the pile of dirty dishes still left on the counter. Would Hank like her she wondered if she were a long distance runner rather than a potter? She thought not. Whatever she tried on lately she couldn’t seem to get Hank to like it. It was his problem she thought but she was wrong she knew because what troubled him troubled her because she had married him. What if she would unmarry she thought. What would she do then. She kept thinking this unmarried thought about this marriage she was married to.

  Mary noticed Maggie watching Hank talking to the pretty dark-haired girl, the athletic one, the beautiful girl with the shiny hair and bright eyes. She remembered the bad time in her marriage when Jack had a secretary working for him that always made a play for him and even Jack her stalwart steady guy had had a hard time because this pretty woman kept being there day after day but he had a growing family to support and had thought, Mary thought, about liking this girl but had decided against it because of his family and of course he had never really liked her much but had liked her because he thought she was available and she had been available to him, very available, but that was long past but Mary remembered it because it had hurt her and she was home taking care of children and all and couldn’t do much about it but she hadn’t gotten all depressed and ugly like some women when they think someone doesn’t care about them. As soon as Jack’s eyes started to wander she kept better care of herself, not less. She bought new clothes so she would feel better and prettier and more energetic. She started running laps at the high school where Lucy had been going to school. She made new friends but not boyfriends just interesting friends and said two can play this game and fuck you if you can’t take a joke thank you but no one was laughing and certainly Mary wasn’t but she was in the Mae West school of thought: never give a man an even break! And she didn’t give her husband one when he wandered and he always had to come home to a beautiful energetic wife who was incredibly capable and he was entirely incapable of losing this incredibly capable wife so he fired his secretary saying that his business was failing or something suitable and at that point in time he could do that and get away with it.

  Lucy had noticed Hank talking to Rebecca earlier and noticed that Maggie noticed him talking to Rebecca now before she went back to the kitchen to finish up the dishes. Lucy got up to help but Maggie said no, please, she’d rather do the dishes just then so Lucy let her and was glad that Gary wasn’t Hank’s type although Lucy and Hank had always been great friends and Lucy loved Hank in the way she did like a Hank friend but not like she loved Gary but Lucy understood what Maggie didn’t because Lucy had strayed away from Gary but loved him still and was glad they had gotten through all of it and that it had ended up like it had but she was exceptionally lucky she thought because Gary was entirely understanding and had been going through a hard time himself and that they survived was mainly due she thought to the baby they had made and the baby had made the connection stick like glue and she was entirely glad to be glued here to this spot she thought. She would think nothing of it if Hank were talking to her like that because he did sometimes but she was Lucy and could be trusted entirely to be talked to but she wasn’t entirely certain of Rebecca because she was different and didn’t give a fuck much about what anyone thought and that was okay to a certain point except when it came to your husband and that’s what it had come to for Maggie. Her husband. And Lucy figured rightly that Maggie was feeling like shit because of it because she was and she was feeling worse than even Lucy knew because she was pregnant, Maggie was, and didn’t know it yet so her thinking wasn’t so good because of the hormone thing which is a real thought twister anyway a hormone can take a good thought and twist it into oblivion before it reaches clean air because that’s what hormones do but Lucy didn’t know this and Maggie didn’t know this and Mary didn’t even know this but Mary if she’d just had less to think about on that day would have been the very first to know but she was so busy with the party and Lucy and the baby that she missed it completely and when she found out two weeks later she shamed herself for not noticing because all the signs were there it just hadn’t been signified and if it had been things might have gone better for Maggie that day but they hadn’t and that can’t be changed now no matter what we might know about it.

  So after the kitchen was clean Maggie sat down with a cup of tea and relaxed but felt pretty grungy because her blouse was still dirty from washing dishes so Lucy took her into the bedroom and they found a blouse that fit Maggie, a pretty green blouse with pink roses, even though it wasn’t really her blouse she liked it and she felt better when she went back into the kitchen because she was wearing Lucy’s blouse, a Costa Rican Blouse, and Lucy decided it looked great on Maggie and that she should have it. And Maggie liked the blouse but it seemed more like Lucy’s blouse at just that moment but she thought it was pretty and thought she would just take it home with her so she planned on it, she planned on owning the pretty green blouse from Costa Rica. It was fresh and pressed anyway and better than wearing the blouse she’d already soiled with all the dirty dishes so she took another sip of tea and decided she needed to put honey in it and got the honey bear and squeezed a glob of honey into the tea and stirred it. Mary got up from the table and stretched and looked outside where Jack stood talking to Hank about something and she was glad to see him relaxed and enjoying himself because life had been pretty tough when Lucy was lost and then found and then in prison for so long and Jack had had to shoulder a lot of the burden and a lot of the work and really hold things together until things came together and he hadn’t always done a great job thought Mary what she meant was he had made some monumental mistakes but they were mistakes and not intentionally made and hurt him as much maybe even more than anyone, she thought sadly, because she could not imagine wanting to hurt him since she did love him and always had even when he was annoying and he had been annoying but she’d never considered leaving him because they were married and she liked marriage and she had always wanted to stay that way so she had. And they had a married love, she and Jack, something they didn’t have to think of so much anymore because they had it and liked it and were comfortable with that kind of love and it kept renewing itself in odd ways like the hurt they both felt when
Lucy was gone for so long and how that love held them together through that hard time and it had, thought Mary, and what would she have ever done if it hadn’t been for Jack all this time. And she thought about saying something to the girls about this love but decided against it at that particular time because they’d think she was corny and she was she suspected so she just thought about loving Jack and what that had meant to her and still did and she wondered what he had to say to Hank who wasn’t exactly the loving type she thought but she had no reason to think it other than the thought that he didn’t love Maggie the way Jack loved her but then thinking that that was truly unfair because not all love is the same and certainly not like Jack and he was special and one shouldn’t compare in just that way so she took the thought back and pretended she didn’t think it. And then she saw Gary come over and join the conversation with Hank and Jack and Mary liked Gary and was glad he had married Lucy and thought that he had good thinking about love things and was glad her daughter had found this man to have love with rather than just love because Mary thought that might be the difference the real corker when it came to loving someone because love was a joint activity not joint joints like the grass or anything although no question that love was a high but not that kind of high a different kind of joint thing where two people were joined in some of their thinking about the way a life might or should be lived and those thoughts sprang from expectation because they had joint thoughts and joint thoughts were rare splendid creatures yes she thought that that was true when you found someone you shared thoughts with that was some kind of great miracle in this life of different thinkers and worth trying to live a joint life about if your thinking was joint but mutually joined hinged connected riveted that’s what Mary thought about joint activity and thought it might be a better way of thinking about love than the other desperate ways someone might think about loving and perhaps she thought it might be mundane or even practical or even boring but she didn’t think so she just thought other people might think so but she didn’t she didn’t not for a minute because her kind of loving was full of the best things her own particular package and she thought tenderly about her Jack that stood talking now to those young guys who were okay and all but different and certainly of no interest to her and she liked that yes she did she liked it greatly thinking about loving him even now after all this time and even through the pain of the early years since the early years always seemed to include suffering somehow and even theirs had but that was past and she had this time now this better time. She sipped on her coffee and walked back through the kitchen, affectionately yanking on Lucy’s long brown braid as she passed and the light from the window still shone into the kitchen and a pretty auburn light seemed to radiate around Lucy but then it usually did thought Mary and the touch seemed to spark Lucy’s mind into thoughts like her mother was just having but thoughts about her own love especially today on her wedding day because this was the first time she’d ever considered marriage in its greatest consequence—the life consequence of it—living forever with Gary and that’s how she thought it but she’d not thought it before she was sure of that before with Gary it had been different and she knew that but the difference now was better she thought because of thinking the marriage thing which was a good thing to think since she was married now she thought. And she needed Gary to live this life with her son she thought surely it would make living like this better and now that she had a child she should live this way with a man and do reasonable things and not the unreasonable ones like she used to do and what she liked about this was that it was a safe choice and the safeness of it made her feel safe and it occurred to her that something might happen in the future that would make it unsafe but she couldn’t imagine what that thing would be and she was entirely glad that she couldn’t imagine it on her wedding day because that would be the wrong kind of thinking on this day to think the bad way about bad things that hadn’t even happened and if one thought that way maybe they should pass on being married and try and get it right before they thought themselves into the wrong thing. The baby cried and Lucy was needed and she liked that thought very much and the cry pulled her up from the table to the baby’s room to do the baby things and into the little world she lived with the baby. Maggie was alone in the kitchen because Mary had walked outside to find Jack since she’d thought about him so much she decided she missed him even though he was just outside and she could see him she wanted to make the real connection and join him for a minute and just then she walked up beside him and put her arm inside his and he liked the feel of it and pulled her close because she was his connection and he knew it. So Maggie finished straightening the rest of the kitchen because the dishes were done and wondered why she felt so weird but never once considered it was from a pregnancy she just didn’t think it because she didn’t feel connected to Hank so she didn’t imagine she was pregnant and pregnant was a real connection, period. She poured herself another cup of tea tea for tillerman she thought as she poured it but who was this tillerman and why might he need tea and thought it a silly thought and as she thought it Patrick left high fiving Gary and Hank and shaking Jack’s hand but not coming in to say good bye to Maggie or Lucy oh well she thought she’d see him at home when she and Hank drove back tomorrow all the way to the Southern California desert and away from this neat sea town that she liked a great deal she had decided and wondered about moving and why couldn’t they she and Hank move here and be in this nice place and if they did they might have a better life then might they not she wondered thinking it would certainly be worth a try wouldn’t it? If they put on a nice town like a pretty new dress they’d have a better life wouldn’t they they’d have a new town pattern to fit and maybe that would be more suitable and make them better and happier and happier with each other and maybe they might fall in love again like they were before when they had great sex and even if the sex weren’t spectacular maybe they’d just like each other again because they weren’t so happy now and she could tell she didn’t like Hank and that he didn’t like her but would she if he did? She might she thought but in earnest she also thought she might not and it might not be his fault entirely part of the fault might lie in her but she hated to think it but she did she thought it. And she knew that it was a bad thought to have but there it was tilled up from the depths for everyone to see. A bad thought. A disgusting thought. Was it disgusting, she wondered, to be honest? No. It was only disgusting if she tried not to be honest. That’s where bad thoughts came from, didn’t they? Being dishonest? Well she wasn’t entirely sure about where bad thoughts came from but she knew her thoughts certainly weren’t good thoughts; how could they be if she thought them because right now she didn’t feel so good and all her thinking seemed ungood she thought but maybe it wasn’t she felt wishy washy like dishwater like a sponge that needed rinsing she felt like an old dishcloth why do you think she felt like this she wasn’t sure of it and shook her head disgusted that she thought it. Then she went to the sink and poured some bleach in a bowl and put the dirty sponge in the bleach and the washcloth too the one she had hung over the side of the aluminum sink she put them both in the bleach and she felt better now even though she thought bleach was a harsh sort of disgusting kind of cleaner surely it got the grayest things white. It did!