by Thea Lim
I have never driven a car on a ferry before and we’re amused by the novelty. When we get to the other side, we’re both awed by the emptiness. There’s no development on the beaches, and when we get out of the car, we see no buildings, no people, just the wavy sand and the full sea, the wind making whorls around our feet. So much space, it hurts the eyes. The air smells different here, wet and pulpy, and it sparks some memory in me, but I can’t place what it is. I just feel nostalgic, as if I’m being visited by a moment from a past life.
It’s too cold to swim or sunbathe, but it’s sunny, with fluffy clouds, and warm enough to sit and watch the surf. We eat our potato chips and I pull you onto me and I don’t even mind that my privates are exposed to the elements. The wind trapping sand in your eyebrows, the hills and valleys of your face.
So soon, we have to get the ferry back. I don’t want to think about Worcester, about the windows that will be sealed shut until April, the stripped trees. On the boat going back, we stand on the upper deck to look for dolphins, but the landscape looks like an industrial park on water, and we wonder if the waitress was joking. It’s still sunny, though, and you show me a game where we throw pennies overboard and try to get them to land on the lip that extends around the base of the boat, the last stop before the moiling waters. We lay our arms as flat as we can against the body of the boat, and when that doesn’t work, we try dropping the pennies way out over the railing, hoping that the wind will carry them back. And when that doesn’t work, we try throwing the pennies as hard as we can, and we try dropping them gently. Each time, the pennies hit a frame, a post, a window, and ricochet into the water, never to be spent again. We are down to our last penny and we each hold one edge, even though this is hard because, you say, my fingers are too fat—you are pleased by your joke—and this penny lands on the edge but on its side, and for one shining moment it stays. Then it rolls off into the water to meet its brethren at the bottom of the Gulf, and the waters swallow it up in some shade of blue that we don’t yet have a word for, and I get such a piercing happiness, I can’t breathe.
I know that this will be one of the happiest moments of my life. I know that, even though I do not know that when we get to the shore, we will learn that the Atlanta outbreak has leapfrogged five states in less than a week and we are in a state of emergency, and in the chaos we will only get as far as Houston.
I want so terribly to hold on to the spot in the sea where our last penny fell. I keep my eyes fixed on it, but the motor has turned the water into a swirling target. And then I blink, and I lose it.
But we lean against the railings and you clasp your hands behind my back, like a bridge, and forever I promise to remember your face against that beautiful sky and the sea tossing us up and down and the merry creaking of the boat and how you say, Polly, I can’t unlove you.
They arrived at night. Polly would’ve missed her stop if not for her cabin mate, who told her to get off.
“This isn’t Buffalo yet,” Polly said.
“They announced Buffalo.”
“It’s a mistake. This isn’t Buffalo. I would recognize it.”
“Last call for Buffalo, last stop before Canada,” the loudspeaker said.
The passengers were herded into a Plexiglas tunnel no higher or wider than the biggest man. A megaphone shouted, “Single file! Single file!” The lights were prison bright. At the front of the line was a row of card tables, and at each table was a man in a hazmat suit and an empty chair.
“Approach and sit! Approach and sit!” the megaphone said.
The man in the hazmat suit said, “Open!”
Polly stared without understanding.
“Your mouth, your mouth! Let’s go!”
Before she could properly part her teeth, he gripped her by the chin with his rubber-gloved fingers. With a single hand he jammed two abnormally long cotton buds into her mouth, stabbing the inside of each cheek. He rammed one up her nose so hard her eyes watered. He withdrew with his bounty and used a dropper to apply a clear liquid to the head of each cotton bud. The liquid turned violet as soon as it hit the cotton. He took a box that looked like an electric pencil sharpener with three holes and stuck a cotton bud in each hole. He drummed his fingers on the box, waiting. The membranes in her nose were still stinging from the cotton bud, and though she tried to stop it, she could feel that inexorable force gathering until out it came: a sneeze.
All eyes snapped towards her. The man across the table looked at her as if they were in the pause between the click of a land mine and the boom. The box on the table emitted a cheery ding. A green light flashed. The man exhaled.
“Free to go,” he said.
Her cabin mate was a silent, short, square old lady, who spent hours lying in her bunk, staring dolefully at the rivets in the ceiling, but as soon as they got off the barge, she changed entirely. She whistled in the customs line, immune to the threatening looks of the passport officials. Polly distanced herself from the old lady, joining a different lineup, the longest one, already anxious about what the official might think of her red conditional passport. A young man examined Polly’s papers for a long time, massaging the center of his forehead and sighing. He glanced at her, then at his computer, then at her again. For one mad moment she thought he had records of everything that had happened to her: the reroutement, the customs police, the Elvis yearbook, Frank’s searches, the abrupt and suspicious end of her bond. Then, in sleepy tones, he said, “Welcome to the United States,” and that was it.
She got as far as the double doors outside the port building, and she was lost. She found herself in the middle of a crowd. What day was it? She had never seen downtown Buffalo this busy, not even on a Saturday night. Perhaps a concert or a game had just let out? People walked in pairs, or in groups, or with dogs, shouting and laughing and throwing sticks in the canal. The ground sloped up from where she stood, the city bathed in reassuring orange lamplight, and not one building doused in weeds. But nothing was the same. It couldn’t have been a concert or a game, because where the old arena had been, there were tall brick buildings instead, a wall of concrete, like a book held too near to read the words. She saw a street sign and didn’t recognize the name. Of course. They had moved the harbor. That was what had happened.
A group of trishaw drivers clustered around the port building, looking to pick up fares.
“You looking for a ride, miss?” one of them called.
“Where am I?”
“Where do you want to be?” he replied. The rest laughed.
She felt a tap on her arm. Polly looked down. It was her cabin mate.
“Where are you going?” the old lady asked.
“Where are we?” Polly said.
“Erie Canal.”
“But they moved the harbor.”
“They didn’t.”
“But everything looks different. The street names are wrong.”
“My ride isn’t coming to get me until tomorrow morning and I know a clean hotel around the corner. Share a room for the night?”
Her cabin mate still shuffled, but she was surprisingly speedy, and Polly, carrying the woman’s old leather suitcase, with its tiny, useless handle, struggled to keep up. Now and then the crowd swung between them and her nerves spiked, then the back of her cabin mate’s head would emerge into view again, her hair flat from the bed. She skated forward at the same even pace, never turning to check for Polly and her suitcase. Polly had imagined she’d go straight to Frank’s as soon as she arrived, but it was too late to call on him now. She knew that made no sense, but it was just easier to follow the old lady down the orange streets. Had this always been the color of the light?
Her cabin mate opened a door out of nowhere and brought Polly into a narrow, high-ceilinged lobby. The whole edifice looked to be half the regular width, like one building had been split into two. A letter-board directory with white press-in letters listed dentists and notaries.
“The hotel is on seven,” her cabin mate said.
&
nbsp; Polly made for the stairs.
“Where are you going?” the old lady asked.
“Stairwell?” Polly pointed to a marked door.
“You can take the stairs if you want, but I’m going to take the elevator.”
“Of course. An elevator.” She heard her own voice, astonished and stupid, but her cabin mate took no notice, frowning at the lit-up call button.
On the seventh floor the old lady banged her fist on a dented green metal door. Something electric buzzed and the door opened. The receptionist did not stand up behind her high counter, so they conducted their business with her eyebrows. Because her cabin mate was too short to see over, Polly handled the exchange.
“How much is it?”
“Ten dollars per, twenty dollars total.”
“Twenty dollars? That’s it?”
Her cabin mate jabbed a sharp elbow in Polly’s side. “You want her to charge more?”
“Tax-free if you pay in cash,” said the eyebrows.
“I only have this.” Polly withdrew a twenty from the $213 they’d given her when they closed her bond.
“Wrong currency,” her cabin mate hissed.
But the receptionist said swiftly, “I’ll accept American dollars.” An elfin hand snatched the bill off the desk.
Her cabin mate pulled down the register and filled it out on a bended knee.
“What’s your last name?”
“Nader.”
“Lebanese?” She smiled up. “I knew it. I can always spot my own.”
As soon as they were in their room, the old lady undressed. On her hands and knees, in baggy men’s briefs, she raked through her suitcase until she found a cloth bag, and she dumped its contents into the sink in the corner, a shower of dirty socks and underpants. She filled the sink with water and soap, and she dug a travel radio out of her suitcase and unplugged the lamp on her nightstand so she could plug the radio in. In the new dimness, music unlike Polly had ever heard piped out of the mini speaker: a man sang like a woman, in high falsetto, and an electric piano noodled a riff, both chipper and melancholic. Her cabin mate unlatched the casement window, a little glass door that opened inwards. Polly sat in a daze and watched her bustle.
“Feel that?” the old lady said.
“What?”
“That. Have you forgotten? It’s called a breeze.” She laughed. “I hate Texas.” She sat down and lit a cigarette.
“Why did everyone say it’s expensive up here?” Polly asked.
“Who’s everyone? These are expensive”—she eyed her cigarette—“that’s for sure. First time back?”
Polly nodded. “Since 1981.”
The old lady raised her eyebrows and blew an appreciative smoke ring out into the night.
“A liberated Journeyman. I’m a courier,” the woman said. “I work for a big law firm. Mostly, I tool around this region. But if they have really important documents for clients down there, I have to take the barge, five days each way, to get the documents south.”
“People up here have business with people down there?”
She nodded vigorously. “A lot of employment now. TimeRaiser has become very popular for staffing up here.”
“You must go up and down all the time.”
“No. Thank God. Only once or twice a year.”
They listened to the music while a haze of smoke layered the ceiling.
Then Polly asked, “But what about the rest of the time? There’s only business once or twice a year?”
“There are other couriers. And they put the low-priority stuff in the mail.”
“The mail?”
“Yeah, the mail.”
Norberto, sitting on the edge of the bed, ringed by everything his lover left behind, insisting there was no postal service.
“You look spooked,” the woman said. “Five days in a sardine can will do that to you. Go wash your face, you’ll feel better.”
And yet later, inexplicably, whenever Polly thought back to that first night, it was a happy memory. The old lady, so content smoking cigarettes and listening to that sad, sweet music and the sounds of the street in a cloud of blue while the breeze ruffled the underpants drying on the table. And everything yet to be decided, all the options still intact.
* * *
When Polly woke up, her cabin mate was gone. She’d left ten dollars on the table and a note describing where the trustworthy money changers could be found. The whooshing of the town filled the room: the sound of a bus’s air brakes and a truck accelerating, honking, mists of speech. From up high, the echoing noises sounded hyperreal, as if all of Buffalo was inside her head, riding around her eardrum in big-top circles.
At reception there were some stale, hard cookies and a pot of gloppy tea on a side table. No one was behind the counter. Polly took a cookie and put another in her pocket, in case she didn’t see food for a while. Outside, it was raining. She held her cabin mate’s map close to her chest so the ink wouldn’t smear. She would change her money, she would buy an umbrella, and she would go to Frank’s.
Again the streets were crowded with pedestrians, everyone running to get out of the rain, and an even more extraordinary sight: the road thick with cyclists in every color of slicker. They flocked like cars, filling the street from curb to curb. She could not figure how to get across the street until she saw that the cyclists stopped at the traffic lights. The hand-drawn map took Polly to a vast indoor market at the corner of Swan and Pearl, which still had their names. The market was sliced up into a million tiny stalls, selling bread and live chickens and bolts of cotton, the whole place shoulder to shoulder with women doing their weekly shopping. The money changer was stationed in a cage in a mirrored stall. He took her bills and put them in a machine that spun them around and counted, and then he handed her the exact amount she’d given him, but in a different currency, with a slip.
“That’s the exchange?”
“Rate is one-to-one. It says on the slip.”
“Then what’s the point of changing money?”
He frowned.
“Do you know where I can buy some clothes?” she asked.
Deeper into the market, there were secondhand clothing sellers, their floors so heaped with rugs that customers kept tripping and the racks kept jamming on furrows of pile. There were bins with clothes for fifty cents, seventy-five cents, a dollar. Misty would have lost her mind. Ankle-length dresses made of slinky material, with high collars and elasticized cuffs, and Polly found herself thinking of Marta. Feeling sick, she tripped over to the men’s side, and found only Springsteen T-shirts. The denim rack had so many pairs of jeans, you could hardly move them, and she didn’t know what style was current. A doe-eyed girl with a ribbon tied around her head, who probably hadn’t been born when Polly was last home, came to help. As she heaped slacks and button-ups and scarves in Polly’s arms, Polly’s eyes filled with inexplicable, horrible tears.
The fitting room was a series of curtains defining a space just big enough for feet. In the safety of this little room, Polly tried to soothe herself. But she was coming unfastened.
It must have been that all the terror and grief she’d bypassed had decided it was safe to emerge now. But this was the day she’d waited for for so long, and it was being ruined. This was a foolish way to think. It was only a day. The lifetime they’d have together after this day was more important.
Somewhere a great epiphany broke forth: there’s only ever going to be one of every day; there will be other days, but they won’t be this day. This was the true source of the tears. Yet she could manage not to see this truth, lying in the corner of her eye, for just a while longer.
In the end, because they were at the top of the pile, she chose a short-sleeved blue shirt with dots, a black shoulder bag, white canvas shoes, and a pair of brown pants.
“I like,” said the salesgirl. “That style gives you a cutie booty. Take this scarf, on the house! A welcome present.” Everyone seemed to know that Polly wasn’t from around here.<
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She bought some lipstick and some blusher in a shade she’d used once and she stumbled out of the market, out the wrong end, and she didn’t see any of the things she’d seen on the way in. Instead, behind a cyclone fence, there were tents. Tents and tents. Some actual tents, many partly collapsed, others made of blue tarps and sticks posted in the ground. The rain had stopped and the July heat made fog rise off the damp streets and the canopies. Everyone living there looked old, though some of them were probably still young. They sat at the mouths of their tents, bare feet sticking out into the walkways, some people trying to hang blankets, wet from the storm, to dry along the fence.
She should go back to the hotel; she could pay them to let her use a bathroom, where she could shower and change. But she had lost her cabin mate’s map. It was probably buried somewhere under a pile of slingback heels.
She stopped at every corner and looked up the street, and each time it was the same thing: an infinite row of towering buildings, tapering to an unseeable point, the friendly, spattered Buffalo landscape she had known, the squat, gappy skyline shredded into tall, gaunt strips. It was as if they had picked up the roads and shuffled them like a deck of cards. Once or twice she thought she found a building that she recognized by the crown molding or the configuration of windows, but when she looked beside these familiar figures for corroboration, where there had been a teeny parking lot or a stand of trees, there were skyscrapers, like matching sentinels.
On and on she walked, following the crowds, believing that, once she got away from the canal, once they were out of Allentown, once she got past downtown, once she got to Elmwood, she would turn the corner and see something she knew. The stretch of anticipation, between corner and corner, became dire. At first she only hurried, at the pace of the fastest walkers in the crowd, ready for the moment when the city would return to itself. But the more blocks she crossed, the more the line where the unknown turned into known receded, and she ran as if there were still time to catch it.