The Moment Before

by Jason Makansi

  She saw him regard her as she approached, as if a movie camera was recording the scene.

  “Mind if I join you?” She stood in front of the man, about two yards away, her head cocked to the side. She reached into her purse, shoving he pistol aside, and slid a cigarette out from the pack.

  “It’s a free country.”

  His eyes and his head moved slightly, but the rest of his upper body remained as posed as a statue. The sonorous voice also stirred something familiar in Holly, but it was too deep in memory to be discoverable.

  Free country. Yeah, that’s what we’re supposed to think. She sat down. He retracted his arm slightly.

  “Freer than any other country. How about that?”

  “If you say so.”

  The man crossed his legs, in that feminine way, Holly thought. His dangling foot jimmied back and forth so fast that it had to be more than a nervous tic. The onset of Parkinson’s, perhaps. He was on in years.

  “Damn sight freer for a lady who is looking like you.”

  Holly lit up, drew long and deep, gazed at the cloudless sky, cloudless in the sense the sky was one big bank of low, unbroken fog, the kind that might block the sunshine the entire day.

  “I don’t mean to pick a fight so early in our acquaintance. We’ve barely said hello, but what makes you think looks has anything to do with anything? There’s nothing free about my part of this country. I’ve been paying every dime of my freight since I was little.”

  He remained rock still except for his leg. “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it, lady. But what’s one to say when a lady looks like you walks up and starts yapping?”

  “How about ‘hello’?” After a moment of silence, she added, “Humidity makes cigarettes taste better, don’t you think?” The man shrugged and rested a hand on his belly, rubbing it slightly as if he’d just finished a big meal.

  “You live around here, or happen to like this bench?” Holly asked.

  The man ignored her.

  She blew perfectly formed smoke rings at a diagonal past the man and towards a burly tree, then admired them as they drifted and dissipated.

  He cut his eyes over to her, like her blowing smoke rings was an act of provocation.

  “I drop my wife off at the super Walmart out by the highway. I come here to walk around and sit. We do this on Saturday mornings.”

  “Seems like a good routine.”

  “More necessary than routine, I think. Our second car crapped out. We could not afford to replace it. I hate this American pastime called shopping. Not many places to smoke anymore, either. My wife, she’s not a smoker.”

  “I’m with you. Hating to shop, I mean.”

  They both paused to inhale.

  “So, you a victim of this recession too?” she asked. “In some ways, I suppose. Who isn’t?”

  “Oh, let’s see … bankers on Wall Street, members of Congress, government employees—”

  “What about you?”

  She wanted to be careful what she divulged to him. “I’m on my way to buy a few things at Saleem’s, then to the post office.” She jerked her thumb towards the square.

  The man became animated. “Ayatollas in there, they’ll rob you blind.”

  How long had it been since she’d heard that word, Ayatollah? Maybe back in high school, during the hostage crisis in Iran. She uncrossed her legs and stretched out in an effort to prevent the flush rising up her neck and spreading across her face. Turning towards the man, she asked, “What is an Ayatollah anyway?” the edge to her voice evident. The man seemed not to notice, or didn’t care.

  “Don’t know. Something … someone I don’t like. A religious nut who hates Americans maybe?”

  Holly continued to stare at the man, but his expression didn’t change. She fought the disgust rising within her as she looked at him. The squares of his dark flannel shirt, dull and faded along the edges of each square reminded her of photographs of rural America taken from an airplane, one gigantic checkerboard. And like his shirt, she assumed the man’s dislike of anyone different than him was dulled by his ignorance.

  “You seem familiar, you know,” she said.

  “You live long enough, lots of people look familiar.”

  The old codger was really beginning to irritate Holly. “No, really, I have a good memory for faces. I just can’t place yours right now. But I will.”

  With that, the man raised up and threw the stub of his cigarette under the heel of his boot, ground it out, and immediately lit up another. Figures, she thought. Non-filtered. Just like his ignorant assumptions. The man began to fidget, which pleased Holly. She’d made him uncomfortable, too. As she continued to stare at the side of his face, he grew more nervous.

  “We do have something in common,” she said and watched the man sit up, pull at his shirt sleeves, and brush his hair back with his hand several times. Finally, he looked at her and stared for a long minute. Holly refused to break eye contact. Slowly, a grin spread over her face. “We both like to sit on a town bench and smoke.”

  The man didn’t smile, but the relief on his face was evident.

  Satisfied, Holly stood up and snuffed out her cigarette. “Well, mister, enjoy another day in paradise,” she said, then bent down and picked up the butt, and dropped it in the trashcan next to her. Then she pointed at the butt the man had left on the ground. “It’s hard enough for the people of this fair city to maintain what it has without littering, too.”

  The man flicked the butt of his current cigarette on the ground, as if to defy what she said about littering, all the while not taking his eyes off her. “Have a nice day, pretty little woman.”

  Men. This one wasn’t any better or worse than a million others who‘d misjudged her because of her looks. Yes, she knew there’d been a time when she’d given them plenty of reasons to misjudge her, but she wasn’t that person anymore. Probably had never been that person. God, she needed the sanity of a visit with Penndel. Maybe she’d hop in the car and head to St. Louis and surprise him. She checked her watch and headed toward through the park and toward the post office without a backward glance.

  As she approached the front of the building, she admired its manicured lawn, a lush square around the flagpole, the US flag flapping in the slight breeze. It was a nice contrast to the deteriorated nature of the rest of the town square.

  Inside, she handed the notice to the man at the counter.

  “You got a truck?”

  “Mustang,” she replied.

  “Package won’t fit. Too big.”

  “Can you tell me who it’s from?”

  He disappeared into a back room and soon reappeared. “Maya Hammond.”

  She froze. What could Maya Hammond possibly have sent her? “You okay, lady?”

  “Yeah. I mean, yes, I’m okay. Just … never mind.”

  “Because you went all pale there for a minute.”

  “No. I’m fine. Listen, I don’t live far, do you think I could borrow a hand truck or something to get these to my place?”

  The clerk looked around then leaned forward. “Okay. But don’t advertise it. Come around back, and I’ll have the package bungeed on the cart for you.”

  It turned out that the package wasn’t heavy, just awkward in shape. She man-handled it through her front door, walked the hand truck back, and slipped the guy a ten spot. She hurried back home and grabbed a kitchen knife. Before she opened the box, it dawned on her. Maya’s paintings! Eight of them, it turned out, unframed, canvasses attached to light wood plank backing.

  Attached to one painting at the bottom was a note:

  Merry Christmas, Cheryl (I mean Holly). I don’t have room for these any longer. And since you are the only one who ever expressed any interest in them, I want you to have them. I hope you like the ones based on picnic scenes I remember with you and your father.

  Holly flipped through the paintings. Nothing reminded her of her father’s picnics.

  5

  June, 2004

 
The day Holly met Penndel was the day she finally got out of Cairo for good. It had become obvious that owning the bar would never provide a decent income and that she needed to move on. She loved her neon marquee sign, but that was about all she wanted to keep from her Cairo experience. Well, that wasn’t completely true. She’d also grown attached to Smitty and Grover, two derelicts who practically lived in the bar. She’d always given them free food and drinks when they needed help, and sometimes let them spend the night and use the rest room to clean up. They were just two average people, victims of circumstances beyond their control. And unlike so many other men, they were no threat to her. She felt good helping them out and was sad to say goodbye.

  She might have left Cairo earlier, but a last ray of hope appeared when that government guy, Stuart Eisenstat, showed up to snoop around. She waited to see if any plans to buy and develop large tracts of land would materialize, which could have increased the value of her property. She even thought maybe Eisenstat would come back and let her in on any plans that might help her out. But he didn’t. Just another one of the useless men who drifted in and out of her life, wanting to drift onto and off of her body. Eisenstat lasted a single weekend. Cute, though, and he had an intelligence and manner she appreciated, especially since such behavior seemed in short supply the older she got. But nothing happened, and waiting for him to reappear ended up wasting another six months of her life.

  Finally, she’d put the bar on the market and sold it for less than she paid. So much for the return on the modest inheritance her mother left her.

  With no set plans, she decided to drive back north to Joliet, visit her uncles, maybe stay with one of them until she sorted things out. It would mean admitting failure and she didn’t want to do that, but the problem was she didn’t know what she did want to do. She didn’t have much in the way of possessions: books—boxes and boxes of books—and albums and CDs and tapes, the outfits she’d put together when she was stripping, and her grand piano, which she refused to store. The new owners of the bar said she could leave it until she’d figure out a solution, but she had to find a place to live that she could afford and that could fit the piano. No easy feat.

  So it was on a bright sunny day in 2004 that she packed her car and headed north on I-57. While driving, she heard an ad on the radio for a new museum in St. Louis, and since she was in no hurry to get to Joliet, she decided to take I-64 and head west.

  The museum, a solid concrete building, was surrounded by vacant lots and a few scattered dilapidated houses. No different than Cairo, she figured, or what had become of her old neighborhood in Joliet. She parked and stretched her back, stiff from hours of driving. She pulled open the heavy glass door and entered the museum. A young man gave her a brochure and waved her in. Admission was free, he told her, but she appeared to be the only person in the place except for a few docents milling about. It was spare and cold, but in a sort of clean, elegant way.

  She headed through a second set of glass doors and out into the sculpture garden, a gravel field that led toward an imposing structure, ugly, if she was to be honest about it. Not much to look at from the outside—thick, massive rusted steel plates several times taller than she was, fabricated into a kind of cone. She started to walk around the sculpture and was surprised to discover it was something one could enter. Just inside, guarding the entrance, a young woman sat in a folding chair, the very embodiment of boredom and fatigue due to the heat and humidity that plagued St. Louis in July.

  Holly walked through the passageway. Immediately, the absorbed heat of the sun radiating through the steel warmed her even more. She wiped her forehead and fluttered her shirt, hoping to create her own personal breeze. She gazed up into the structure and started down the gravel pathway. The narrowness of the path, along with the leaning and uneven curvature of the walls disoriented her, and her steps faltered in a sort of double-step wobble. She reached out to brace herself and heard, “Don’t touch the walls!” Holly froze and closed her eyes.

  Who would make a sculpture that causes people to lose their balance, and then expect them to not touch the walls in order to stay upright?

  After a moment, Holly felt she was on firm footing again and opened her eyes. She focused on the path itself. Although the sculpture looked like a cone from the outside, inside a spiral walkway wound toward the center. The gravel crunched beneath her two-inch platform sandals, and beneath the shoes of the young woman who now followed her. Holly stopped and turned back toward the girl.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t touch the plates.”

  “Okay. I won’t. I promise.”

  “It is, after all, a work of art,” the girl said with the tone of an old school marm, “even if the observer is inside of it.”

  “No touching,” Holly said. “I get it.”

  In the center, the tunnel-like path opened into a space about thirty feet in diameter. Holly circled the space. What am I supposed to see, to feel? What makes this ‘art’? She tried to ignore the footsteps of the girl following like a watchdog ready to pounce if the intruder made a wrong move. Finally, she stood in the middle and looked around. So what? she wondered. I don’t get it. She was about to leave, disappointed, but something made her hesitate. Soles firmly planted in the gravel, body steady, she looked down at her feet, then craned her neck back and looked straight up at the sky.

  The sky! Confined within the outlines of the steel plates, she felt as though she was floating towards the sky, towards its endlessness, the world drifting by as clouds, as vapor, as everything and nothing. She closed her eyes and absorbed every ray of sunshine pouring down on her as if it were the light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. The sky was not only hers, but of her, within her, about her, and her alone.

  She opened her eyes and looked around again, letting her eyes trail around the walls encircling her, and then again, tilting her head up toward infinity. Ah, so that’s what it means. Confinement as liberation. Focusing the mind. Freeing the mind. Being the mind, the universe. Everything.

  It was overwhelming. The disorientation that overtook her when she’d entered was gone. How many people came through here and never looked up? She wanted to run down the path and experience the whole thing over again. She wanted to shout, wave her arms, cry. She could barely contain herself. Suddenly, she couldn’t wait to get back to her journal, write to her father about the revelatory joy she’d just experienced because somehow she knew her father would understand. In fact, she felt he was speaking to her in this incomparable work of art. She could even hear his voice.

  But first, she knew she couldn’t leave without experiencing the entire museum. She turned back to the docent, who was still following close behind, and was about to say thank you and tell her that she now understood that the structure was, in fact, a work of art, when she heard a loud voice echo into the narrow, leaning chamber.

  “This place isn’t handicap friendly!”

  Holly emerged from the path to see a man in a wheelchair at the top of the steps leading down into the gravel field where the sculpture sat. The docent rushed past her toward the man, and Holly quickly followed. It was then she heard someone shout above her. She glanced upward and saw a guard stationed on the roof overlooking the sculpture. Was he there before? And why was a security guard needed? In the next instant, another security guard dashed through the heavy glass doors toward the three of them.

  As they all approached the man, he leaned his bulk forward in his chair and pointed to the steps. “How am I supposed to experience the art if I don’t have access to it?”

  “Sir, I apologize. The stairs and the gravel are part of the sculpture’s setting.” The girl flashed a conciliatory, institutional smile.

  The security guard, hand on his baton, reached the trio.

  The man in the wheelchair tugged and straightened his faded green army jacket. “I could give a shit about your landscaping. If one dollar of tax revenue went to support this place, it should be accessible to everyone. But here
I sit.” He waved at his chair, poised on the edge of the steps.

  Holly thought the docent was going to cry. “I’m sorry, sir, there’s nothing I can do. Shall I ask if your admission fee could be returned?” Now Holly knew the girl was rattled.

  “Admission was free, you moron!”

  The girl stepped back, dumbfounded. Enough of this, Holly thought. “There’s no need to get nasty, mister. How about we carry your chair down the steps and help get you into the sculpture?” She looked at the docent and then at the burly security guard. “Can’t we carry him?”

  “That’s not museum policy,” the guard protested.

  Holly squared her shoulders and put her hands on her hips. “If we’re talking about policy, what about the Americans with Disabilities Act? Besides, this isn’t about museum policy, it’s about a human being.”

  “Go get another docent,” the security guard barked at the girl and scowled at Holly as the docent quickly disappeared back into the museum. After a few minutes, she returned with another man and the four of them picked up the chair, maneuvered it down the steps, and struggled to push it through the gravel and into the sculpture.

  After they got to the middle, the guard and the docents stepped back, and the man in the chair looked around. After a long pause, said, “So, this is Joe.”

  He bent down and picked up a fistful of gravel and, as he let it sift through his fingers, he looked up at Holly. “So who are you?”

  “Holly Chicago. Nice to meet you, Joe.” Holly bent down to shake his hand.

  “My name is Penndel,” he said, smiling for the first time.

  “And . . .” Holly looked around, “who’s Joe?”

  “The sculpture.”

  “Joe,” she said, as if tasting the name for the first time. “Hmm.” She stretched her arm out as if to run her fingers along the inside panel, and then stopped herself. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Joe,” she whispeed.

  After a few moments, Holly asked the guard and the docents to help get the wheelchair back through the gravel and up to the pavement. Penndel looked up at her and said, “How about you join me for a cup of coffee? My way of saying thanks.”