She Poured Out Her Heart

by Jean Thompson

  Once she was outside she had to stop and get her bearings in this whole different night time—this gliding sliding darkness and its smears of light, the cars thumping by, the sidewalk requiring some concentration and effort on her part. The convenience store was thisaway. Or thataway.

  She set off for it. A man passed by and maybe he said something to her, she couldn’t be sure. Asshole.

  The convenience store looked like an armed robbery waiting to happen, a grim place with the cashier behind a plexiglass shield and coolers full of Keystone and Busch and headache in a bottle of wine. Slim Jims and bagged snacks that were already half-dust, cigarettes in a cage, a Middle Eastern clerk who’d seen it all. Someone was already using the ATM, a boy and girl having trouble getting their card to work and giggling about it. Hurry up, Bonnie told them silently. You didn’t want to absent yourself for too long when it came to barroom intrigues. Things were, in all senses of the word, fluid.

  She was still in line behind the couple when her phone buzzed. She fished it out and stared at it. Eric, it said, or rather, WALGREENS, the code she’d used for him in case Jane ever happened to get her hands on Bonnie’s phone, and wasn’t she clever. The phone buzzed again. What the hell was he doing? It was after midnight. “Hello?” Bonnie said, squeezing the phone up against her shoulder in a pretense of privacy.

  She couldn’t hear anything. “Hello?” she said again, as the couple finished their business and she fumbled for her own card. Two men walked in behind her, crowding the space and making drunk noise.

  “Bonnie? Where are you?”

  “What?” It was hard to hear with the racket of the store.

  “I said, where are you?”

  “Why do you—wait, you better not be at my place. Are you at my place?”

  “Calm down. I’m at home, where else would I be.”

  “What do you want?” Bonnie said, trying to fathom the machine in front of her, watching the men behind her in the reflections of the glass window. Her heart was making rabbity thumps. “It’s Saturday night, I’m out, where else would I be.”

  “All right, look, I just wanted to say hello.”

  “Yeah, hello.” Bonnie swiped her card and the screen lit up with expensive options. Did she want to accept the bank fee? Get fast cash? She tried to enter a hundred and fifty but the machine balked.

  Eric said, “OK, I guess you’re in the middle of something. I guess you don’t have to be overjoyed or anything. But I don’t like the way we left things.” He waited. “Bonnie? What are you doing, it sounds like you’re in a street fight.”

  Getting money for cocaine so I can get myself laid, she didn’t say. “That’s exactly what it is, a street fight. I really can’t talk right now.” She punched in a hundred dollars fast cash. That looked like the best the machine would let her do.

  “I wish,” Eric said, “that I could find some right way or right time to talk to you, but maybe there’s no such thing. So look, you were loved. Still are. That counts for something. It’s worth something. I wish there wasn’t this blazing heap of wreckage all around it, and I guess you don’t have to help me feel better about myself. But there it is.”

  Bonnie didn’t answer. Eric said, “You’re the most intense person I ever met, you know that? Always full steam ahead. Always restless. It’s scary to watch sometimes, it’s like, I don’t know, some really scenic natural disaster. I don’t know what you’re looking for. But I sure hope you find it.”

  The machine was shooting twenty-dollar bills into a stack, making its whir and chunk noises. Bonnie held the phone away so he couldn’t hear it. “Hey, Eric . . .”

  “Just don’t ever sell yourself short,” Eric said, and then the call ended.

  Bonnie gathered up the money and headed back out to the street and the humid, jittery darkness and fuckety fuck, there was nobody to tell and what would you say anyway, why was he not here, if he cared so much, meant so much? Why be angry for no reason/no good reason, why answer the phone in the first place if she hadn’t wanted to hear what he had to say? Well she had, and it hadn’t helped anything.

  Walking back into the tavern was like walking back into a mouth. It closed over her and mumbled her this way and that while she tried to get back to the bar. Once she reached it, her drink was gone and somebody else had taken her seat, no surprise, so she looked around for Patrick, didn’t see him at first. The fizzy part of drinking had gone out of her and left her with a headache just starting up like an itch in her brain. Where was he? It was too crowded to move freely. She nudged her way along the bar until she spotted him sitting at one end, taking a break, it looked like, with a beer in front of him.

  “Patrick!”

  He didn’t see or hear her and Bonnie said, “Excuse me,” over and over as she advanced. She waved at him and now he did notice and waved back, still absorbed in conversation with two girls with dyed hair (one pink, one shoe-polish black), both of them as scraggly as stray cats. Now what? How was she supposed to get him the money, was there any way that didn’t scream drug deal?

  First, of course, she had to get to him. She’d stalled out and wasn’t going to come any closer unless she climbed over the bar. Bonnie got an elbow in, planted it on the bar and ordered a 7UP, and stood sideways waiting for it. She asked the bartender to tell Patrick she needed to talk to him. Watched as the message was conveyed, as Patrick had another pull of his beer, put it down, all cool and unhurried and like to drive her crazy, then sauntered along the back of the bar until he reached her. “Hey Bon.”

  No way to be subtle. “You remember when you loaned me some cash? Well I have a hundred of it for you.” She held out the twenties, folded over in an effort to look at least half-assed discreet.

  “Yeah? Really? Thanks, sweetie.” He leaned over and gave her a smacking kiss on the forehead, grinned.

  “I hope it helps.”

  “It sure does. I’ll get it back to you real soon. Promise.”

  “Not a problem. You working till close?”

  “I’m thinking I can get away early.”

  “Excellent,” she said, nodding, beginning to relax, her skin warming as if it had been polished.

  Again he leaned in toward her. “Want me to save a little for you?”

  “Ha ha,” Bonnie laughed. “You better.”

  So funny. He gave her a wink and took his slow time getting back to the far end of the bar. Finished his beer. Stood and reached behind him to make sure he had his keys and wallet. Bonnie watched him pocket the twenties, roll his neck around to loosen the kinks. Then he put an arm around the girl with the shoe polish black hair and the two of them, walking unsteadily since the girl was so much shorter, made their roundabout way to the door. The girl’s face was set in a half-smile of private amusement, and although she kept her gaze fixed on the floor and did not look at Bonnie, it felt like the girl had managed somehow to know everything about her.

  ordinary, again

  She didn’t know know. But there was a way in which things came to her.

  Once the certainty settled, Jane thought, of course. Of course it had been Bonnie. It was such a reckless, wrongheaded, Bonnie-type thing to do. Not that Jane had gone looking for guilty e-mails or anything distasteful like that. The notion just slid into place in her brain and clicked. In the same way she was sure that, for whatever reason, things between Bonnie and Eric had ceased. It was as if the air around them had changed, lost some of its charge.

  She guessed she should be furious at Bonnie, hurt, betrayed, disappointed, etc., but really it was more like exasperation. Did Bonnie never learn? Never check herself, talk herself out of anything?

  As for Eric, if she was not disappointed in him, it was because she was not capable of any further disappointments.

  She didn’t care to think about how it might have come about. She did not picture such things. There was a sense in which she could be sa
id to have no imagination, and there were times this might be considered fortunate. Whose fault, who to blame? What did it matter? People who let sex push them one way or another never wanted to believe they could do anything to stop it. You might as well go all the way back to the snake in the Garden of Eden. The irresistible apple. Yes, apples, red and green and yellow, tawny or shining, all the colors and tastes you might imagine because this was paradise and there was no need to confine yourself to just one apple, just one woman.

  Apple apple apple. Then Bonnie said, “Somebody should tell her he’s not worth it,” and Jane struggled through layers of cottony panic and realized that she was looking at actual apples right in front of her. Spacing out again in the middle of conversations, television shows, and now, grocery shopping and she could not let that happen. Where had her list gone? Why so many apples? Think!

  Her mind chased itself around in scurrying circles. Oh, because. Because it was that time of year, the harvest. What a relief, to come up with a reason. If you could entertain any such quaint notion as “harvest” in the vast, efficient commercial process that brought the apples from tree to market while outside it was still late summer and miserably hot, something gone wrong with the sequence of growth, the seasons, the entire planet, they said, no, too much, stop. All the things she had to put herself through in order not to think about Bonnie.

  But here was Bonnie herself, whom she had forgotten about, or wanted to forget about, standing in front of her with an expectant scowl on her face, needing an answer.

  “Who?” Jane said. “Tell who?”

  What was Jane thinking? What was she ever thinking? Entranced by the ingredient list for make-ahead casseroles? Writing poems in her head? You never knew. Bonnie had been carrying the conversation by herself for some time now, trying to strike a spark. Going on about the weather, about which vegetables one might, or might not, wish to eat, about her car, for God’s sake—the last, desperate throw of the dice. Hello, hello, anybody home?

  Not that Jane wasn’t often spaced out, not quite on target. It was her medicine, all that brain candy. There were side effects. The medicine got her turned around, Jane said, and led her to trip over her own feet, if your brain had such a thing as feet, which was foolish but perhaps Bonnie knew what she meant? And Bonnie did, from long experience with the overmedicated population. But you had to wonder if Jane was not entirely unhappy to be skimming just above the surface of her day’s chores, her day’s routines, gaining a peculiar kind of power by absenting herself. Who would have thought it? Jane being Jane was a force to be reckoned with.

  Meanwhile, Bonnie was moping around being Bonnie. Her dismaying episode with Patrick had been two weeks ago, and she had not been able to resist compounding her humiliation by calling him, by arguing with him, accusing and berating and weeping and raging. Which never helped anything, only left you feeling weak and empty. Patrick had brushed her off at first, then turned annoyed and defensive. He’d never promised, etc. It was not his fault if Bonnie had misunderstood. He was going to pay back the money, she didn’t have to worry about that, OK? Just as soon as he got a little bit ahead. Since when did she get so touchy anyway, so . . . Bonnie heard him trying to come up with another word besides “bitchy.” So needy. Possessive. His voice took on a plaintive note. She was always such a good sport.

  Yes she was. And that was her whole problem. A good time good sport and way too careless about the damage she did to herself and to everyone else. “Screw you,” Bonnie said, and hung up on him.

  She stomped around the apartment, swearing a little more. Then when she trailed off, she called Patrick back and got his voice mail, and who could blame him for not picking up. “Look, I’m sorry,” she said, into the waiting hum. “You’re right. I overreacted. I’ve been feeling . . .” Her turn to come up with a word. “Vulnerable. Not your fault. Never mind.” She almost said that he should keep the damned money but she didn’t want to let him off that easy. “Take care.”

  She’d hung up, feeling she’d reclaimed at least a bit of her equilibrium, if not her dignity. Of course the one she really wanted to talk to was Eric, but that wasn’t going to happen. She missed him. He missed her too, he’d said so. Well, it had run its course. Adios. She was having a hard time leaving it be. It was as if something had been torn out of her, root and branch. Some idea of herself that had grown up alongside Jane and Eric and was now sundered. Well, suffer in silence, since she could hardly expect Jane to listen to a bunch of lovelorn blather about her own husband. And so by default, she was forced to complain about Patrick. As she had been doing for much of today’s visit.

  She had not planned on coming out to see Jane on this Saturday, but here she was, and maybe it was just as well. Sooner or later she’d have to resume some semblance of normal relations with them. Come to dinner. Go back to the zoo. Jane said that Eric had taken the kids to some organized funland, to atone for his many late hours and many missed family dinners. “How about I stop by,” Bonnie had said, seeing an opportunity.

  So here she was, trailing after Jane in the everyday boredom of a suburban grocery store. Not that she had anything much better to do. Why not ruminate over root vegetables? Love among the cabbages. She would make herself ill with wisecracks.

  She would do better from now on. Be better. She could hardly help but improve, given this particular low point. Try to operate on some other level besides gratification, selfishness, vanity. There had to be some more worthy effort you could make, even if, you had to admit, it might not be as much fun as orgasm.

  Trailing after Jane, she had to maneuver around a cart full of cardboard produce boxes, grapefruit, it looked like, and, of more interest, the young couple next to it, engaged in a low-key but public argument. The boy worked here. One of the produce guys. He was supposed to be unloading the grapefruit but the girl had come to track him down and confront him. That much seemed clear, and he was plenty pissed off about that. He kept looking around and jamming his hands in his pockets, not wanting anyone he knew to witness. Bonnie caught some of it as she passed them, all ears but not wanting to seem obvious about eavesdropping. “I can’t talk now,” the boy was saying. “I’m working, OK?”

  “Well when can you? It’s not like you ever . . .”

  Bonnie moved on, but turned around once she’d reached the end of the aisle and pretended to be sorting through the packaged carrot and celery sticks. She could still hear them, from time to time, and now she had a good view of them. Oh honey, she wanted to tell the girl. Give it up. There was nothing about the boy to recommend him, nothing at all, just another sweaty loudmouth—even trying to keep from being overheard, he was loud—who would continue to treat her badly, out of indifference or arrogance. The girl was too pitiful. That beseeching, heartbroken face. As if that would soften him, make him change his ways. How old were they anyway? Not old. A year, maybe two, past high school. Bonnie hoped to God they didn’t have children. Or maybe this was what the quarrel was about. She was pregnant, and he was saying it was her problem, not his. Maybe she had gotten pregnant on purpose. Girls did that sometimes, thought their boyfriends would go all mushy at the idea of babies or at least come around in time, or maybe it was just stupid vindictiveness, or some peculiar process for preserving the species. Bonnie herself had never done such a thing, set a pregnancy trap. And thank God, because imagine all the dreary men she would have to be reminded of on a daily basis, long after the man himself had lost all appeal.

  Earlier that day Jane had said, out of nowhere, “Kids can really tie you down. You do know that, don’t you?” Bonnie wondered why Jane would say such a thing.

  The girl was trying to keep her voice low. Some of the tone came through, some of the desperate or whiny things she had hoped not to say. Whatever convincing case she had hoped to make was falling short. The boy smirked and tried to move past her to the work cart. He said, loudly, “If you say so. Makes no nevermind to me.” Because nothing she
did made any difference to him, couldn’t she see that? Couldn’t anyone ever? The breathtaking dumbness of lovelorn girls, herself of course and always included!

  Bonnie caught up with Jane, who had moved on to the apples. Positioned herself at Jane’s elbow so that she was certain to be heard: “Somebody should tell her he’s not worth it.”

  Although Jane knew well enough that she was standing right next to her cart of food items, looking into the unexpected complications of the grocery’s expansive ceiling, with its systems for lighting and ventilation and support all laid out like a blueprint or perhaps a skeleton, there was a moment when up and down reversed themselves, a dizzy, sick-making lurch. Was it her medicine? Or one more episode of Crazy Jane, suburban madwoman and unsuitable mother?

  Her vision steadied. The intricate wires and piping and metal bracing, the braided cables and vents fit together like puzzle parts. What if you had everything wrong? Upside down, backwards, and inside out. What if she ceased to apologize for herself? Ceased to worry what they thought of her? Give crazy some room to grow, if that’s what it was. She guessed Eric wouldn’t much like it. He didn’t get a vote anymore. As for Bonnie, here she was again, what was she even doing here?

  Why had she come around, full of the same old moping and complaints that Jane, her straight man, was meant to take seriously, meant to ignore everything else? How stupid did Bonnie think she was?

  And then she saw from Bonnie’s startled face that she had let her thoughts betray her, as they said in old-fashioned books, and because she was not yet ready to tip her hand, say what she might have said, know what she already knew, she composed herself and said, “I never noticed how big this place is. Warehouse big. I mean, you know it from walking around, but . . .” She nodded at the ceiling. “It’s just a long way down.”

  “Don’t you mean, a long way up?” Bonnie asked, and Jane closed her eyes and when she opened them again the ceiling was turned around where it was supposed to be, and Jane agreed with Bonnie, yes, of course, she meant up.