Shine of the Ever

by Foster, Claire Rudy;

  I grimaced when the liquor hit my tongue and forced myself to swallow it. “This is godawful. You know, I think I’ll turn in early tonight.”

  “What’s your rush? My flight isn’t until midnight; we’ve got hours.”

  “I’m driving your car while you’re out of town, so I should probably be kind of sober.”

  Ted shook his head and ordered another beer. “I’m still hoping to come down with something fatal at the last minute. The problem with having so many sisters is that you have to go to their weddings and dance with their ugly friends. Maybe the plane will crash and put me out of my misery.”

  When his cab came to take him to the airport, I hugged him and said I hoped he caught the bouquet, just to make him laugh. Outside, I lit a cigarette—trying to quit smoking too—and walked around the corner looking for Ted’s car. All these blocks looked the same. Big Craftsman houses and apartment buildings crammed next to rows of cherry trees and attractively overgrown gardens.

  It was easy to get lost, especially with my mind on other things. I went around the block twice before I found where Ted had parked.

  The front end of his car had been smashed. Both headlights were broken. The front fender was bent and mangled. I stood on the sidewalk, my cigarette still fizzling in my fingers. I checked the license plate. It was his car. It had my Palahniuk book on the backseat. The driver’s side door was scraped; a long ribbon of red paint was missing from the scarred metal. There was no note on the windshield. I couldn’t even get the hood open to see how badly the engine was damaged. I imagined, for a moment, that Ada had done it, intentionally wrecked my car just to have some revenge. But she’d need a sledgehammer to do this kind of damage. Someone in a truck had hit it, more likely, and driven away without a second thought.

  I walked back to the bar. Ted was gone, but the bartender flashed me a friendly smile.

  “Forget something?” she asked.

  “My car got totaled. Can I call a tow truck?”

  She gaped at me. “Jeez, I’m sorry. Need a phone book?”

  She put the yellow pages on the bar and went back to polishing the rows of dusty glasses. I looked at the ads for a long time, trying to make sense of them. I wasn’t even sure who would tow at this time of night. The car was too damaged to run, and I couldn’t afford to get it repaired. I’d have to call Ted and tell him what happened. He wouldn’t be back from Colorado until next week. I didn’t even have a number for him, didn’t know where he was staying.

  “You mind if I take this?” I asked the bartender. Without waiting for her to answer—she didn’t even look up—I ripped a page from the book and stuffed it in my back pocket. “Thanks,” I called on my way out, and she waved to me through the plate glass window. I didn’t linger to see if she noticed my handiwork.

  The next morning a fat man with the name Mel embroidered on his shirt hitched the car to his truck.

  “You can check with the insurance company, but in my opinion this is gonna be scrap metal,” Mel said. He turned on the jack, and the car limped up the metal ramp. “Look at that front axle. You’d never get this thing rolling.”

  I nodded. Mel handed me the license plates. The car could stay in the tow yard until Ted got home. I couldn’t find the registration in the car, no insurance, nothing. For all I knew he didn’t bother to keep the payments current.

  “Good thing I’ve got a bike,” I said to Mel, who only nodded and hopped into the cab of the truck. Its engine grunted and spat a cloud of diesel-scented smoke into my face. As the car disappeared down the street, I realized that I’d left my journal on the passenger seat. I watched for a minute, then turned away, walking in the other direction. It felt like a good time to get rid of things.

  I biked to work every day, even though riding a single-speed made my legs ache. But it was a good feeling. Things were starting to make sense again.

  You Can Learn a Lot from Lydia

  Lydia had long hair that had been dyed many times. At the moment, it was chestnut brown going mousy at the roots. She had a piercing in the center of her lower lip that she sucked on as I talked. A run in her stocking seemed to irritate her, and she stuck her finger into its ladder and scratched her leg. She stared at her empty glass on its coaster. We were the only customers in O’Brien’s, the bar jammed next to Wimpy’s.

  “Do you want another one?” I was back to day drinking. Ted wasn’t speaking to me, and I wasn’t sure how much I cared. Construction had started next door. Yellow tape stretched across the window. The contractors ripped out the grimy seats and tossed them into the green dumpster on the curb.

  “Got any quarters?” Lydia asked.

  I extracted a few from my pocket.

  “I’m gonna kick your ass at pinball,” she said, dismounting her stool. “Watch me.”

  The only machine was The Twilight Zone, featuring the voice of Alfred Hitchcock. Lydia hammered the flipper buttons and tilted the machine back and forth. She got the three-ball bonus and kept them in play for a few minutes before they slipped into the side chutes.

  “Your turn,” she said, feeding in a few more coins. As I took her place, I read the orange letters on the screen. The high scorer’s name was Lloyd. Lydia pulled up a barstool.

  “Actually, that’s me. It’s a joke.” She helped herself to one of my cigarettes.

  “You’re just trying to psych me out.”

  “It’s true. I am the high scorer on Twilight Zone. You will never beat me.”

  I pressed the start button, making the board light up. A plastic hand reached up from the slot of a tiny grave. “Why Lloyd?”

  “Because it’s the perfect name for somebody who would master an 80s pinball game. I was either gonna be Lloyd or Snake.” She nodded at the ball that was loaded into the springshot. “Don’t be shy.”

  For the first few rounds, I played well. The elevated bridges lit up, and the raven at the top of the board flapped its stiff wings. Lydia leaned closer; I felt her smoky breath on my neck. The ball slipped past me in a heartbeat.

  “You probably got screwed on the flippers,” she said.

  I shrugged, trying to play it off.

  “The game was really easy one week, and I guess the company wasn’t making enough quarters. So they sent in a repairman with a suitcase full of flippers. They all looked the same, but they were just slightly different lengths. Not so different that you would notice.” She nodded to the bartender, who drew two pints. “I watched him put in the shorter ones, and nobody had any luck after that.”

  “So, it’s not my fault?”

  “You’re no Lloyd,” she said. “But you can blame the flippers if you want to.” She winked at me over her glass.

  On the huge TV screens that framed the bar, a pair of tall blondes batted a tennis ball back and forth. They looked like sisters, tall and corn-fed, in nearly identical whites.

  “I’m so bad at sports,” she said. “Funny how I keep ending up in sports bars.”

  I tore a matchbook in half, separating the matches from their cardboard spine. I laid the matches on the bar and arranged them in squares, letters, a house. “I miss Wimpy’s.”

  “Can’t keep missing things, though. You’d never stop.”

  I blinked at her. Ada, Alison. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her the whole story. Maybe she knew a magic word that would remove my bad luck or a leaf that I could slip into my shoe to lead me to happier days.

  “I miss New York,” she said. “I miss Chicago. I miss New Orleans.”

  “I miss the way Portland used to be.”

  She laughed. “I bet the people who were here before us say the same thing. We’re invaders. Even if you were born here, you don’t ever really belong.” She picked up a few matches, crossed them in an X. “Facts about me: I’m afraid of heights and hissing cockroaches, I’ve never kissed a guy, and I have dreams about the future.” />
  Ann Peebles came on the stereo, and Lydia sang along, her head tipped to one side. Her skin was fine as milky glass. I watched her lips change shape and imagined how it would be to touch her face—like dipping my hands in a bowl of cool water. When the song was over, Lydia flipped open her phone, checked the time.

  “Shit, I gotta go.”

  “Where?” I didn’t want her to leave. We were easy with each other; our words crossed in playful volleys. I liked the way she sang in front of me. She was a chatterbox, but I didn’t mind. She didn’t hold anything back.

  “I promised a friend I’d go to his show at the Goodfoot.” She stubbed out her cigarette. Her face settled into a sullen look. “Bad timing.”

  “Want a date? I’ll pay the cover.”

  “There isn’t any cover; he’s not that good.” She laughed and stuck her phone back in her bag. I saw a cigarette pack in the pocket, still wrapped in cellophane.

  “Take me with you anyway,” I pressed.

  Lydia sucked her lip ring. “You don’t seem crazy. What’s your name, again?”

  “Jamie. Or Jay.” I spread my arms. “See? Not crazy.”

  I left a tip on the bar. Outside, she shivered, pulling her jacket close.

  “Autumn,” she said. “At least it’s not raining.”

  “Wait ten minutes,” I said.

  “I’m not made of sugar,” she said. “Not gonna melt.”

  On the flat stretches, I rode with no hands, and Lydia copied me effortlessly, laughing when I wobbled. She was almost as tall as me; our bikes were evenly matched. We pedaled fast, even on the hills. It was good to be with someone who could keep up, for once.

  When I was twenty-three, everything felt like a parable, a sign. I was grateful for the obviousness of Lydia and the ways she showed me how to find her.

  Again

  “You’re a bad influence,” Lydia told me, bumping her fist against my arm.

  I grinned, reached for the pitcher. “You didn’t want to see him perform that badly,” I said. “Admit it. Beer with me is more fun than an open mic.”

  “You’re a very naughty girl,” she said, waving her finger at me. She looked past the Night Light’s curtains at the steady rain. “Plus, now I have to bike home in this.”

  I pulled a Connect Four box from a pile of games on the windowsill. “Let’s play until it stops.”

  Two pitchers and five games later, it was still coming down.

  Lydia looked up from the score columns. “You look a little green around the gills.”

  The women’s room had two stalls, neither of which locked. I looked at myself in the smoky mirror. My pupils were black pennies. Nausea hit me hard, sent me wheeling toward the stalls. I bent over the toilet, heaving. The beer came out my mouth, my nose. It ran down my chin into the bowl. I felt my throat spasm and tried not to fight it. You’ll be better in a minute, I told myself. But my guts burned and even when I stopped puking I was afraid to stand up straight again.

  I wiped my mouth with a piece of toilet paper, trying not to look at the mess. My hands shook. I pushed the handle, then turned to the sink. Icy water stung my gums. I scrubbed my face with a paper towel, then spat into the basin.

  “Do not fuck this up,” I muttered to my reflection, nodded, and smoothed my shirt. “Get her number and then go home.”

  Lydia touched my sleeve when I sat down at our table. “You okay?” she asked.

  “I’m calling it a night,” I said. “Can I walk you?”

  She grinned and stuck another one of my cigarettes behind her ear for later. “I only live around the corner. But don’t get any ideas.”

  “Hadn’t even crossed my mind,” I said.

  I watched my feet as we walked to the door. The soles of my shoes felt slick on the bottom, as though I was skating on a sheet of ice. We went a few blocks, steering over the neat lawns. I realized that Lydia was leaning on my arm for balance. She shifted heavily from foot to foot.

  “How drunk are you?” I asked. “Worse than me?”

  “Bad influence,” she mumbled, grabbing me tighter. She stuck her nose into the sleeve of my jacket. We passed dark houses and cars covered with crumpled canvas. It was nearly midnight, maybe later. My feet hurt. A blister burned on my right heel; I must have worn a hole in my sock.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” I asked.

  “Just a little farther.”

  A single streetlight cast gray shadows on our faces. The houses were paper silhouettes. Lydia leaned her head on my shoulder, and I sniffed her disheveled hair. Dry and stiff from so many color jobs, it crackled against my cheek.

  “You smell nice,” I said.

  “Because I smell like beer? Man, you’ve got a problem.”

  “No, I like your actual smell. When I was a kid, we had these big velvet cushions out on the porch. You smell like those, when they’d been in the sun.”

  “A happy smell.” She squeezed closer. I put my arm around her, letting her lead. I liked the feeling of trusting her.

  She stopped in front of a white house with a few gnarly rose bushes growing over the rusted shutters. The stoop was covered in old newspapers and pine needles. A cat of indeterminate color sat on a metal chair by the front door and stared at the porch light’s dancing moths.

  I untangled myself from Lydia. She patted her bicycle’s handlebars.

  “Bedtime,” she said. She touched the buttons on my jacket, then put her hand on my shoulder. “I don’t know where you came from,” she said.

  “I want to see you again.” The words were quick to my tongue. My honesty surprised me. I could be like this with her.

  “You want my phone number?”

  “I want you. Not just your number.”

  She stroked my arm, soothed me. “You want to visit me tomorrow?”

  “I’ll come back after work. I know the way.”

  “Bring flowers,” she said. “Nobody’s ever given me flowers.” She tucked my hair behind my ear; her fingers brushed my skin. She was so gentle.

  “Anything you want.” I leaned forward, inhaling that sweet smell. She smiled, stepped in close. Her mouth was warm and sticky, candy softened in the sunshine. Her body touched mine, and a tiny space warmed between us. When she pulled away, I reached for her, wanting to make her stay.

  “I’m glad I met you,” she said. “But you shouldn’t drink so much.”

  She slipped through the front door, letting the cat dart in behind her. I watched her through the window. She put her purse on the kitchen table, then turned out the lights. Her movements were slow and simple—the movements of a person who believes herself to be unobserved. With the house dark, the night around me was suddenly chilly.

  Riding home, I found my balance easily, pedaling in lazy circles through the interlocking streets. Love, I thought, was no different than riding a bicycle drunk—how the hills melted under my tires, how I never wanted to stop, how, even if I fell, the scraped palms of my hands were singing with light.

  Ada

  Although the flower stand only gave a half-hour lunch, Ada had taken an hour and gone to get a haircut at Ward Stroud’s down the street. Now, the new style hugged her face in a neat flapper’s cap. Her neck, exposed to the cold, felt pink and raw. She pulled her coat collar up. There was a tiny heat lamp in the booth, but she was forbidden to use it—high temperatures shortened the life of the flowers.

  She huddled on a stool behind the black buckets of stems, counting the minutes to the end of her shift. Arthur was taking her out. The haircut was a surprise for him, since he’d been hinting that she needed another change. She checked her reflection in the cold-case glass, liking how her face looked heart-shaped. She’d tell Arthur that she was his valentine.

  Ada practiced smiling at herself in the glass, trying to look pretty and light. Her face muscles were tight from b
eing pleasant all day. Nobody wanted to buy flowers from an ugly girl, so she dressed fashionably and always wore lipstick. She’d lost weight and didn’t need a bra—she was finally thin enough to fit into Arthur’s wool trousers. They were becoming one of those neat, androgynous couples who shared clothes and finished each other’s sentences. She smoothed the part in her hair. He’d like it.

  And then, just before closing time, Jamie walked by. She paused by the lilies. Like everyone else, she looked at the flowers, not noticing Ada. Her messenger bag was new, and she was smiling in spite of the cold. Ada watched her kneel by the buckets and rub a petal between her fingers. When she stood up, she blinked. Ada licked her lips and tasted blood.

  “Ada?” Jamie said. Her voice was a whisper.

  “It’s me. Hi.” She was shocked to see Jamie again. All the things Ada imagined saying flitted from her head like a balsa airplane. Her mind went pirouetting toward the river, unable to catch its balance. She had the sensation of falling through the sky into a cold, evergreen embrace. She could hardly breathe.

  “How are you?” Jamie pressed her fingers into the wooden shelf in the stand window, as though to steady herself. The skin around her nails turned white.

  “Fine.” But it felt like a lie. The new haircut, the job, school. She must look so different—a stranger. Living with Arthur had transformed Ada into someone unrecognizable. She wanted to reach for Jamie, to touch her hand, as though that would undo the months of silence and transform them both into who they used to be.

  “You look happy,” Jamie said, passing her eyes over Ada again.

  A lump rose in her throat, and she swallowed hard. Jamie had never brought her flowers, and Ada wondered who she was buying them for today. The lost time made it difficult to ask.

  Jamie ordered hyacinths and a branch of pussy willow and watched while Ada cut it into twigs. Ada’s hands moved unconsciously, twisting the stems into a helix.

  “This’ll look nice in a vase,” Ada said, wrapping brown paper around the bouquet. “If you put them in warm water, they’ll release more of their perfume.”

  “Thank you.” Jamie fiddled with the change in her pockets.