by Thea Lim
Her mother’s birthday passed as it always did, the clocks changed, the butter expired and was deserted in the hot fridge. But ads for a movie appeared everywhere, with a release date in bold type across the poster’s face. The date was posted in the elevator, in the foyer; the driver even hung an ad in the bus. It was the first movie made since the founding of America, and Mel Gibson had traveled from 1983 Hollywood to make it. Norberto started a collection jar in the apartment lobby so they could rent a TV set for the night of the broadcast.
This was the date; this was the one. Frank would come, by the day of the premiere. She got a copy of the poster from Norberto. Whenever she felt the slightest tremor that she’d been tricked and Frank was seventeen years dead, she took the poster out and gazed at the digits, and they soothed her.
Moody Plaza buzzed with a sense of communal celebration as the broadcast day drew closer. Every evening Norberto stopped to tell her something: there was enough in the collection jar that he might be able to make potato chips; he was wondering if they had enough chairs; did she like Mel Gibson?
The day of the movie, her neighbors jammed the lobby. They stood in bunches in the dark, happy and shy, even though they’d listened to each other snore and fart and cry for months. Polly elbowed her way to the stairs. Desperation thrummed in her chest, and her hands went cold.
She kept the lights off in her bedroom and she threw the curtains open. A boat setting sail blew its horn. The sky was the color of a lightbulb right after you shut it off. The movie had begun. She could hear her neighbors making noises as one organism: a gasp, a pause, then laughter. Would Frank have trouble getting through all the commotion?
She lay completely still until doors started opening—the sound of residents coming back, the movie over. When the shuffling stopped, she got up. She took the movie poster down from her wall, folded it, and put it in the garbage.
Norberto was still in the lobby organizing folding chairs.
“Wasn’t it great?” He looked elated.
She went outside. The weather was changing. All along, she had known Frank wasn’t coming. It was she who had invented his vast, urgent movements. In the end, there was only Polly.
1979
* * *
On Sundays, Polly wakes up at Donna’s. She does her laundry and she waits for the clock to flip 10:30, when she’ll go to Frank’s. One Sunday, Polly wakes up at Frank’s, and she watches his even breathing, its rhythm like the tides. That Sunday, at his grandpa’s cabin, they open their eyes at the same time, and see a deer at the window, its breath on the glass. For breakfast they have the toast he butters with a half inch space for holding, or they have bacon and eggs at the diner on the corner by her house, or they eat muffins in the car on their way somewhere, and for months after, she finds carrot crumbs in the puckers of the seat. They go grocery shopping for garlic and lemons and tuna, for Frank to make pasta. They go shopping for a birthday beanbag chair for his goddaughter. They go to the beach and he drowns her hands in cup after cup of sun-hot sand. They go to the movies to see Star Trek and Moonraker, The Black Stallion, Norma Rae, and Time After Time, and he lets her hold his hand with her popcorned fingers. They drive to New York City to watch the Phillies play the Mets. They drive to the Cheektowaga flea market and she loses him by the antique vases, but he turns up near the hooks. They talk about music or what they did this week. They talk about his mother, they talk about why Polly and Donna act like office mates. They talk about the regulars at his work, they talk about the old ladies where she works. They talk about how to do things: how to change a tire, how to make gnocchi, how to darn a sock, how to do a headstand, how to chop wood. They talk about how they love each other, how long and how much. She says, Tell me why you like me again. The sun and the shadows lie in cross-hatches across his legs. He says, Because you’re good. She wants to know, Good at what? He says, You’re a good person. She laughs and asks, Is that slang for sexy? She presses on—What do you mean, good? He says, It’s not like you’re a protest singer, but when faced with a decision, you always do what’s just and right. It gives me a sense of security. She laughs again, perplexed now, because this is not the answer she’s fishing for. But after, she’ll decide she likes this better than if he’d said, You were meant for me. It’s a sensible answer, almost the kind of thing she would say. They listen to records. They drink coffee. They play cards. He unwraps her skirt and she undoes his jeans. He takes off her socks with his toes and she bites his cheek. Sweat pools in the diamond made by the meeting of their chests. They do this in the morning or they do this late at night or they do this for all the afternoon. And when she reaches the point, at the burst there is an explosion of time, and all of the moments they will ever have together occur at once: the first, the four hundred and eighth, the three thousandth, the last. The sun goes down at five p.m., or seven fifteen, or it keeps shining till nine. The sun sets and they lean on his kitchen counter and drink screwdrivers. The sunset makes oily rays across the windshield and she unfolds his visor so he can see. The sun is dropping behind the bank of supermarket cash registers and the middle-aged man in the lineup, with nothing but a basket full of Coffee-mate and Hungry-Man dinners, tears at Polly’s heart. The sun sets and Frank is Polly’s entryway into the ordinary world, a way to live among the people who always know the day of the week, people who never eat dinner alone at McDonald’s on a Sunday night. For dinner they eat fish and chips, or a very large salad, or at the Lebanese diner, or he makes a pizza, or they go to his parents’ and in the folds of the tablecloth he touches her knee. After dinner they lie in bed and watch headlights flush the ceiling. After dinner they try to guess the Sunday Night Movie playing at his neighbor’s, coming through the wall. After dinner he does the dishes and she scrubs the tomato seeds heat-bonded to the stove. After dinner they take a bath and listen to the radio and count the tiles in the floor. She sleeps with her arm around him, she sleeps with her hand on his thigh. She tucks her hand into his waistband, she sweeps her thumb across his eye. He puts her hand in his pocket. He frees her hair from her collar. He wipes a tear from her nose. He gets the fuzz off her lashes. He does the zip on her dress. He kneads the knot in her spine. He kisses her shoulder, he kisses her temple, he kisses her mouth, he kisses her eyes. He kisses her cheek, he kisses her thigh, he kisses her elbow, he kisses her eyes.
GOOD MORNING!”
On a November Monday, there were no seats on the shuttle and the windows were opaque with morning moisture, giving the feeling of traveling inside a packed plastic bag. Polly couldn’t see that the bus was about to lurch around a corner, right when she took her hand off the grab pole to pocket her ID. She was thrown, face-first, into the coveralls of a nearby woman. The woman grabbed her shoulder and righted her, and Polly stumbled back in a deluge of apology, held fast to a pole, and faced the window. But right before she regained her balance, there was a moment where the proximity of another person’s body, that human warmth, made relief wash through her. This was the happiness of touch, and in that instant she was like a plant standing up, as water makes clay into mud.
“Did you ever go to the Demographics Center?” Misty asked while her sister snoozed across the aisle.
Here in 1998, Polly had made a swift habit of hiding all her wishfulness, and this was nothing new; long ago she’d learned the importance of acting practical from Donna. But messy-haired Misty, who was easy friends with everyone, was openly, daringly hopeful. Polly had to tell Misty all her expectations, because Misty was the final and only source of external confirmation that Frank was coming. Misty said just what Polly wanted to hear: “I’m sure it will be great news.” Polly gazed upon the back of Misty’s frizzy head like it was a beacon. Misty believed.
A few days later, on the way home, a man sharing her bench said, “Say, you’re the new one, the romantic. Did you find your missing beau yet?”
“You must have me confused with someone else,” Polly said in horror.
“No, you’re the one, I know. Misty t
old me about you.” He chuckled. “I sure hope, for your sake, he turns up!”
She laughed too, in confusion and mortification. Afterward it disgusted her to remember her response. She wished instead she had said, What’s that supposed to mean?—both as a comeback and an actual question.
On Sunday, Sandy said, “Did you hear back yet? Hope for the best, prepare for the worst!” and Polly wished for death.
She started to hear condescension in the morning hellos. Poor dear, they thought. How can anyone be that young, to believe in a love that endures? All her neighbors thought her uncritical, naive, as if the only way she could have arrived at a different conclusion from theirs was by not truly thinking things through.
If she’d been there longer, she would have learned that everyone was always interested in everyone else’s searches—not because they didn’t believe, but because they dearly wished to. Everybody was looking for someone.
Polly returned to the Demographics Center five weeks after her first visit, preparing herself to hear that she’d have to wait another month, or a year. She was unnerved when the woman produced an envelope labeled with Polly’s name and number and said, “Probably not good news.”
“What?” No matter how unfeeling Polly tried to be, she could not keep up with the disappointments.
“Small envelope. Probably not good news.”
Polly ripped the contents in two trying to get the thing open. The torn paper was a stingy slip, only large enough to contain her details and the message Frank Marino: No results found.
“What does that mean? Is he dead?”
“No. It would say if he was dead. It means that he’s not in the country.”
“In the country?”
“In America.”
“Could he be dead and not in the country?”
“The results don’t preclude that.”
Polly searched for another question that could get her the answer she needed.
“But could he be unlisted? He’s here but they don’t know his address?”
“Well, in that case, it would say ‘unlisted.’ Though, you know, now that you mention it, I don’t entirely comprehend the difference between ‘unlisted’ and ‘no results found.’ But I do know that ‘no results found’ means ‘out of the jurisdiction.’ Most likely, let’s say ninety percent likely, it means ‘out of the country.’ Bottom line: they don’t know anything about him. But it’s worth paying just to know, I always say.”
It was a scam. It meant nothing. There was no reason to feel anything about this information—other than shame at her own foolish believing. But Polly asked Sandy how to get to Buffalo anyway.
“You have to take the boat. It’s very expensive. Over a thousand dollars.”
“A thousand five, easy,” Misty said.
Polly waited until Misty was ensconced in conversation with someone else on the shuttle, and then she asked Sandy, “A boat? Why a boat? Where does the boat go?”
“You can’t fly,” Sandy scoffed. “Too dangerous.”
“Why is it dangerous?”
“That’s how diseases are spread—instantly.” Sandy snapped her fingers. “And you can’t take a train or drive: the railways are defunct; the roads are garbage. You have to sail, from Galveston to Miami, from Miami to New York, and then I guess up the Hudson River and through the Erie Canal.”
“What’s wrong with the roads?”
“You hear this all the time from rookies. It’s like you all think it’s an easy thing to clean up a disaster. The pandemic was one thing. But consider the infrastructure. People just left. What happens when all the little people who keep the world running disappear? Roads, bridges, highways either flooded, exploded, or collapsed within ten years. Why do you want to go to Buffalo?”
“Just curious.” Polly kept her gaze out the window.
“They found him, didn’t they?”
Polly ran down possible replies: I don’t know. None of your business. He’s here. But she was too deflated for subterfuge. “They said, ‘No results found.’ ”
“But TimeRaiser knows everything in America. He must be elsewhere.” Sandy said this in her righteous way and Polly concentrated on the comfort of “he must be” until it eclipsed the shock that he had left without her.
“Where could he have gone? Buffalo?” Misty rejoined the conversation.
Polly ignored her.
But Misty wanted to talk about it. Later, in the hallway, she brashly brought it up again. “Disappointing results, huh?”
“I wish you hadn’t told everyone about my search.”
“Sorry,” Misty said, surprised, and then in a cutesy voice, using w’s in place of the r’s, she said again, “Sorry!”
Polly’s face didn’t soften.
“I didn’t know it was a secret. You know, it’s really crowded in the United States. Cold. Expensive. You’re better off here.”
“Don’t tell anybody about my results, please.”
But she must have, because then Polly began to see something new in everyone else: a tilt to the head when they addressed her, a softness in the eyes. Pity.
After that, Polly avoided all her neighbors.
* * *
On sober days, Polly and Baird worked together like cogs in a clock, exchanging wrenches and pliers instead of words, a language in tools. He only had one record, the soundtrack from Cabaret, and he played it at least once a day, but it was one of Donna’s favorites and Polly didn’t mind. He would hum along, sometimes even giving in to song, forgetting Polly was there, crooning along with Liza Minelli about how this time was bound to be better.
On drunk days, he mumbled tears, he unbuttoned his coveralls to his navel, he told aimless, slurring anecdotes about Before. Once, he crouched down to take a closer look at a child’s rocking chair, and as he leaned forward precariously, she saw a urine stain the size of a dinner spoon, high on his thigh. She had not been able to get the image out of her mind.
She had thirty months to go until her bond was up and she could go home to Buffalo. It was only a couple of years, she wouldn’t even be in her late twenties by the end of it, and it was a plumbless lot of days. Every unit of time was a border she needed to breach. Work took care of the daytime and, if she was tired enough, the evenings, but then she still had Sundays to cover. She would have given anything to have something to do on Sunday, with its pale walls and the daylight never changing on the ceiling.
Polly knew herself, and she knew that she was not a brave or remarkable person. Someone else who was not Polly would’ve been able to think up a brilliant scheme to speed through her bond. Someone else might know how to run away and survive in the swamp, how to eat weeds and navigate by the stars. Donna might have been able to, after all of those action and adventure TV shows she loved. Polly did not know what had happened to Donna.
One beautiful Sunday, Norberto gave Polly a book of crossword puzzles. She was at the swaps board, scouring it for new messages.
“Are you looking for something in particular?” he asked.
“No. I don’t have anything to trade. I just like to read them.”
“I see,” he said kindly, and she reddened.
“Do you like this sort of thing?” He tossed her a blue-and-orange book with Puzzles Vol. 1 in bubble letters on the cover.
More than half the puzzles had been completed in chunky, confident letters. Halfheartedly she picked at an unfinished one. But then she turned the page and kept on going, until she looked up and it was almost Monday.
The next Sunday she went back to the store. She waited ten minutes while Norberto explained to the woman ahead of her how candles were made, and while she was waiting, she decided she’d even pay money for Puzzles Vol. 2, even if it meant she had to stay in Galveston a few more days.
“Sorry, dear,” Norberto said. “That was the only one. You shouldn’t have finished so fast.”
“Oh.” Her gullet tightened, like a cable tied to a weight. She looked down at her copy of Puzzles V
ol. 1. “Do you know the name of the three-word, ten-letter Thailand town that borders Burma?”
He shook his head energetically. “I hate those things.”
Loneliness tackled her, compacting her until she had no more breath. She sat on the curb. She laid her cheek on her knees and imagined Frank. She could see him at the intersection, hopping the curb, crossing the block with his dear, swaying gait. She kept closing and opening her eyes, but each time there was only the empty, pummeled street. Norberto came out and regretfully told her she was creating a hazard.
* * *
In late November, a whole week went by when Baird wasn’t drunk once. He became consumed with their quarterly review, which was coming up in a few days. “You shouldn’t be so complacent,” he snapped at her—though every morning she arrived before him, and every evening she left after. “If I go, you go.” The logs became outlandish. There’d be no entry for days, and then there’d be three in a row, announcing fantastical feats. The morning before the review, she intended to work through lunch, as she always did, to avoid her thoughts and the endless accounting of days; but when he saw it was her mandated lunch hour, and her, still in her corner with reams of reed, he shouted at her to go before he got written up for a code violation.
She handed her tiffin carrier through the kitchen window, and the server filled it with gray black beans and some wan-looking broccoli. No one liked to eat in the unlit, stuffy mess hall. There were penalties for any meals left unfinished, and if they ate in the mess hall, their tiffin cans were checked at the door before they could leave. No one knew what the penalty was.
Everyone ate on the rim of rocks along the seawall, rocks in as many colors as skin. The scorch of summer had ebbed into a phase of gentle, sunny days, like a sixty-day May. The littlest rocks were perfect for stacking, and dozens of rock piles, like wee russet people, gazed nobly out to sea. A group of young adults from North Carolina held debates.