by Thea Lim
“Why were you trying to get to Texas?”
“Why do you think?” Donna’s old sharpness remained.
Polly felt a new kind of pain; she had not thought there were new kinds of pain to know.
“I was trying to get to Houston. I was going to join you in the future.”
Something broke free in Polly, like ice calving from a glacier. She took her aunt’s hand. Donna was making a fist, so Polly wrapped Donna’s knuckles with her own fingers. Polly talked very slowly, and at the end of each sentence her voice rose uncontrollably, like she was reading from a passage written in a language she hardly knew.
“You know how I told you I’d arrive in Houston in 1993? They rerouted me. To 1998, in September. I thought that as soon as I arrived, Frank would be waiting for me. But he wasn’t. We had a plan, but it didn’t work. I tried to keep my head down and just get through, but I had some bad luck with my boss. Then I had to work in a factory. I had to move to a worse place, sort of a shed, with lots of other women. But everybody was nice, so it wasn’t so bad. Then a guy I knew, from the first place I lived, asked me to move in with him, to help him with some housing scam, for money. Then I had to leave his place too, because we had a disagreement. And then my bond was over and I came back up here. And that’s it, here I am.”
Polly waited for Donna to say, Okay then, and pat her on the shoulder, like she would.
Instead Donna said, “You must have been very scared.”
“It wasn’t for too long.”
“It was almost a year. That’s a lot of days to be completely on your own like that.”
“Others had it a lot worse than me.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you.”
“It was all right.”
Donna started to cry. Polly had no memory of ever seeing her cry before.
“We didn’t know where you were. I kept waiting and waiting. I relied on Frank for news. I should have just come to get you. But I was scared. I’m so sorry.”
She was shuddering with sorrow and Polly put her arms around her.
“It’s okay, Auntie. I’m okay.”
For in that moment she did feel okay. A light filled her, beginning in her belly, then shooting up her windpipe and swelling into her mouth.
* * *
They made tea and put some cookies on a plate and sat on the balcony.
“Are you afraid of heights?” Donna asked. “You never used to be afraid of heights.”
“What makes you think I am?”
“You always sit with your back to the edge.”
“No I don’t.”
“Yes you do. We got a million-dollar view and you never look.”
“I don’t really like the view.”
“You don’t like the view?!”
“I don’t like to look at the city.”
“What’s wrong with the city?”
“It’s changed so much. Buffalo is gone.”
“It’s not gone. It’s right there.”
“It’s gone and I can never go back.”
A sob blasted its way out of Polly. Donna rushed to her and pulled Polly’s head to her chest, as she might have done when Polly was a little girl.
“It’s not gone,” Donna said. “Look. It’s right there.”
It was the beginning of a millennium. It was a new year, the year 2000, and Donna started murmuring about Polly getting a job.
“I got some contacts at the market. Maybe we could get you a stall. People could bring old things they find and you could fix them up.”
No response.
Donna tried inserting a disclaimer, “The apartment’s paid for, and I make enough money off my suits to feed us both. I just think it would be good for you to get out of the house.”
Donna made other suggestions. “If you don’t want to do furniture, there are so many other things. You could be a baker. Didn’t you like cooking? Or computers, you could learn computers. They’re the way of the new millennium, Al says. We’re in the twenty-first century now, we have to upgrade ourselves.”
Polly just rolled over on her side and tickled Derek’s belly methodically.
“We should get your papers sorted out,” Donna said, one sunrise. “We should ask Frank. He must have connections that can fast-track your application and get you permanent residence.”
Polly gathered the dog hair embedded in the rattan runner.
Al came over for dinner. Over a dessert of sour-cherry preserves, Al asked Polly if she had any background in literature.
“Not really, why?”
“Peggy, at one of our city libraries—I’m on the board, you know—she’s leaving us. She’s having a baby. So now we need someone to man the circulation desk.”
Donna was quiet—a rare occurrence.
“Or I suppose I should say, we need someone to woman the front desk. Ha! I mean, we don’t pay much. Or I mean, we don’t pay. It’s a volunteer position. But it could be more one day.”
“Polly’s still finding her feet,” Donna said.
“That sounds nice, actually, Al. Thank you for asking me.”
“It’s the Riverside Library. It’s been somewhat . . . neglected.”
“That’s where we’re from. Me and Donna, that’s where we used to live.”
“You never told me that,” Al said to Donna.
“It was a lifetime ago,” Donna said. “Or it was, for me.”
In the end, the library saves Polly’s life. Half of the books hadn’t even been catalogued, and no one had even selected a standard system of classification. Some sections are alphabetical, others are Dewey Decimal. It is pandemonium. Many of the books are so bedraggled that there’s no way they can go out on loan without being mended. There is no Mylar, so Polly uses double sheets of old newspaper and prints the name of the book on the spine and the cover in thick, black crayon. There is work for days. And, by some miracle, Riverside Park is still there. It is only a matter of time before they build something on it, but until then, when the thin winter sun allows it, Polly eats her lunch there with her mittens on, and watches the Niagara River flow.
These days, her senses have been recalibrated. She can pick out golds and reds and pinks in Derek’s coat, when before she thought of him as only brown. She sees all of the lines on Donna’s hands, one hundred rivers, a mark of all the years she weathered while Polly slept. She can hear little birds walking in the snow behind her lunch spot by the river, a sound as loud as blinking, these birds who stay through the winter, while everyone else goes. She can smell the icy nip of the million waters the Niagara carries past her feet, waters that maybe once lapped up to Norberto’s boat. All these meager things are so wonderful and yet sad. It will never be the twentieth century again. It will never be 1999 again. This must be how people feel right before they die: absurdly sentimental. But, as silly as it is, she can’t help it. On the first warm day in March, a house on the edge of the park leaves its windows open and the curtains toss in the wind.
Four months into the new century, on an April evening, a grumbling crowd gathers at the bus stop.
“Friggin’ construction,” someone says, pointing to a posted sign. “They’re detouring us around the whole neighborhood. This will add ten minutes to my commute.”
Polly looks at the map to see where the detour will go, and she sees a route she has traced with her feet one thousand times, to Donna’s house.
Street by street, she has given up her old city. She has opened the lid to let this air turn everything to dust. Except her old home, only a short walk from the library, she has spared. It is the last place she cannot bear to know is gone. But now the hour is upon her.
She usually lets the moms with kids and the elderly get on the bus first, but this time she shoves to the head of the crowd and rushes the first empty window seat. The roads still cling to their old shape. If she squints, she can see the old city underneath.
The bus makes a turn and a turn and another, and the crowd complains about the dizzying
ride, and Polly is nervous, as if she’s going on a first date. How can the house still be there? What if it passes before she sees it?
As the bus makes its final turn, she gets this ridiculous idea in her head. When they go by her house, she might see herself. Like in an old time travel movie where the timelines cross and there’s two selves. The original self hums in the kitchen, making a pie, while the new self crouches under the sill, waiting for the moment to send a signal of the bad things to come.
She could go back and tell her old self not to go to 1998. They could all stay together.
But what will happen to this self? She’ll have no place in this world. She will have to be killed off.
And then the house is passing her. The oak tree in the front has grown monstrous. The yard is littered with plastic toys and bicycle parts.
But still, there. There’s the pink siding. There’s the white paint stain on the footpath. There’s the bedroom window looking down to the street.
The places of a life gain a type of magic. Going back will have a cosmic effect. The two yous cannot occupy the same day and territory; there will be a rip in the space-time continuum.
But of course, nothing happens. The bus takes another unpleasant turn, and they’re back on a main street. There’s only the people, still complaining, and the smell of old bread, and the fact that it’s a Thursday.
Polly sits with a dry mouth and her hands wedged between her thighs, trying to feel all right and failing.
There’s a boy, sitting with his feet propped on his porch railing, bouncing a misshapen basketball between his legs, watching the traffic go by. There’s a girl, wearing a white hat and climbing the stairs to a house, then turning around to check a piece of paper in her hand.
Polly thinks, But this is life. This is living, and there’s still so much more to come.
DECEMBER 1999
* * *
It was the end of a millennium, New Year’s Eve 1999, and Donna wanted to have a party. She bought a cassette player and they borrowed chairs from the neighbors. Al made “champagne”—apple juice with vodka and fizzy water. Polly selected the most restrained outfit from the ones Donna had picked out for her: a blouse in ever-gradating shades of pink. During the party, Polly stayed in the kitchen and washed glasses, and every time the front door opened, she thought her heart would stop, but Frank didn’t come. More than anything, she was enraged with herself for wanting him to come. After all this time, it would not leave her. And then the clock was going and everybody was kissing and it was too late: it was already the new century.
After the last guest had left and Al had fallen asleep sitting up, his chin halfway to his crumb-covered belly, Polly took Derek out for his pee. The night sky was a cold purple, and Polly had that feeling that something was about to happen, though she’d long mastered how to repress that kind of thing. But there he was, sitting on a bench by the gate in a velvet tuxedo, with an unopened bottle of whiskey in his hand.
“I thought about coming up,” Frank said. “Then I didn’t.”
It had been snowing, and the wet had melted his hair gel to reveal that he still had his curls after all.
She was working very hard to keep breathing at a normal, even pace.
“Will you come with me?” he said, and that same hope she was dismayed she still possessed was all over his new face.
“Somewhere like where we used to go,” she said.
She gave Derek to the security guard and Frank took her around the corner, down Elmwood, to where a grand hotel stood, where once there’d been grocers and liquor stores.
“The Ritz,” he said. “Just launched.”
Her heart sank.
“You don’t want to go in? I don’t know where else is still open.”
“No. Okay.”
The bartender knew Frank’s name. They sat down at a low, round table in a dark corner, almost lost in the folds of plush blue curtains that swooped down from the great heights of the ceiling. Polly had to sit on the edge of her deep armchair to reach the table. She kept her coat on.
“Two screwdrivers,” said the bartender, delivering drinks. “Hold the cherry.”
The screwdriver was such a bright color, it glowed. The ice formed glossy, orange ridges, and moisture beaded on the outside like tears.
“I ordered for you. Or if you don’t drink them anymore, I can get something else.”
“You remember.”
“Of course.”
“I haven’t had one of these since 1980.”
“Good night!” This was a new saying for him. “Maybe you should have both.”
It was too pretty to drink. So many nights she had lain in the container, picturing a glass that looked exactly like this, conjuring up its curves and angles until it floated in the darkness before her eyes, there to hold if she only put out her hand.
“Costs the same whether or not you drink it,” he said as a puddle gathered at the base of the glass.
She took a sip. She gasped a little as it lapped over her tongue, and for a second she was transported. For the rest of her life, as long as she lived, she would never again taste anything so wonderfully, painfully sweet.
His eyes were wet. He was angled towards her, but the armchairs were heavy and high armed, almost like sitting in a bucket, and any movement towards each other would have to be deliberate, conspicuous, difficult to conceal. She kept her hands in her lap.
“I’m so sorry I never came to see you since you’ve been back.”
“Why didn’t you come?”
“I was ashamed. I walked to Donna’s every week. The gate was as far as I ever got.”
“You were at your house. That day in July when I came to the door.”
His movements went slow. He blinked. He moved his mouth. He nodded.
“I panicked. Like a child. I thought about that moment for eighteen years. But when it came, I still had no clue what to do. Immediately I realized what I’d done, so I went after you. I followed you to my bar. But when I got there, again I had no plan. I’m stupid.”
There was nothing gratifying in this. Polly only felt hollowed out.
“I want to know what happened to you down there, but I have no right to ask,” he said.
“Why do you want to know?”
“It was all I wanted to know for many years.”
She nodded. He had spoken in the past tense.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened to you?” she said.
“Oh. All right. They sent me to the hospital. I think I hoped I’d die.”
“Why?”
“I thought I would never see you again.”
“But I told you I would find you.”
“I didn’t believe that we would make it.”
“That’s clear.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, making asterisks out of his eye sockets. Then he opened them. “Maybe I shouldn’t keep going.”
“Keep going.”
“After six months I was in the clear. But I had nowhere to go.”
“Did you ever consider keeping your promise to meet me?”
“Of course I did. I stayed in Houston. I started volunteering at the hospital. I’d been there a year when I met Louisa.”
“Louisa?”
He nodded.
“Your wife?”
He nodded.
“So you met her after just a year?”
“Closer to two years.”
“You’re right. You shouldn’t keep going.”
But she couldn’t have said how many years would have been enough to make it feel all right. She drained her glass, no longer tasting the drink.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said. “Anything that you say, you’d be right.”
“There’s nothing to say. You know when I left, they didn’t tell me they weren’t going to send me to 1993. I thought I was arriving in 1993. They only told me in the airport, when I arrived, that it was 1998. And even still, I thought you’d come anyway. I went every Satu
rday to the place where you said you’d meet me. I risked so much because I thought you would come. Every day, for weeks and weeks, I waited for you.” She hated herself like this, so pathetic and loose-lipped.
“I tried to go,” he said.
“What?”
“I tried to get to Galveston to meet you, in 1993. But the border had only just opened. There was no way to go except by private boat. I made a search for you instead. All they could tell me was that you hadn’t arrived yet. I kept checking.”
“In ’95 and in ’97.”
“How did you know?”
“Why didn’t you check every year?”
He rubbed the side of his nose.
“Why didn’t you check last year?”
“Louisa,” he said. “We started divorce proceedings two years ago. It’s a mess. If she noticed the money missing, I could lose custody.”
Polly had fabricated a mythology to withstand what was, in the end, so brutally banal. She didn’t want to talk anymore.
“Why did you come tonight?” she said.
“I couldn’t go on not seeing you. I’ve been desperate to see you.”
It was suddenly sweltering hot. She struggled to undo her coat buttons.
“That doesn’t make sense. Before, you were too ashamed to see me. Now you’re desperate to see me?”
“Both.”
She couldn’t get her arm out of her sleeve.
“Let me help you,” he said. He held the sleeve while she pulled, but her bracelet was caught on the lining. So he took her hand and slipped the bangle off, over her wrist. Then he let go. It was an unthinking action, a reflex, as if they were still lovers.
They stared at each other, both understanding what he had done, a sensory memory reactivated. She could still feel the kiss of his hand on her own, the joint, the pad, those particular bones.
“You’re sweating,” he said, and then he took a napkin and dabbed her forehead, his face close enough to block out the light.
Her nose was full of saw-toothed tears.
He said, “You look exactly the same, you know. Like a mirage.”
His face was red, his neck was red, even the tips of his ears were red.