by Abby Frucht
“I wonder how much of a hunk he is,” she continues. “What do you say, Joanie?”
Joanie squints and says nothing, but I say I don’t like his kelly green shorts.
“I didn’t ask you,” says Mary after a while. “You’re still on your honeymoon.”
I shrug and say it’s true. Mary says she doesn’t blame me anyway because Tim has such good taste in potato salad. Joanie snorts and says that her potato salad is better than mine. She eats an olive and rolls the pit around in her mouth before spitting it into her palm. Soon the man in the kelly green shorts approaches, and stops at the chin-up bar that in the harsh sun is like a beam from a raygun. Up he goes, and down, and up again, slow as can be with the sweat rolling out of his armpits and the three of us gazing, perched in our skirts on our three checkered napkins, just now feeling the heat. Around his body moves a vapor like the undulating waves above a surface of asphalt, so we watch as if waiting for him to dissolve.
“Drink up,” Mary orders, filling our cups with retsina. “This place is no Garden of Eden, I suppose.”
She leans back on her elbows and shuts her eyes. Pretty soon we are all three doing this, leaning with our faces into the hard sun, sipping warm beer and bitter retsina, staying quiet. The retsina, in flowered paper cups with cut-out handles, is impossible to swallow. I dump mine in the grass when no one’s looking, and fill the cup with froth from my bottle of beer. Every so often some man jogs past, and we offer cookies and forkfuls of potato salad. Then we fall silent again, and that is how the afternoon goes by, like a slow-moving cloud, filmy and out of reach. Joanie tells me I look like a health food ad, my hair fanning out against a backdrop of sky. Then the sun starts to drop and we start packing up, gathering paper cups and cigarette butts and tossing them into a shopping bag along with Mary’s eyeglass case and the jar of olives. She offered one to every jogger that went by, but only one accepted. He said he needed some salt. He had a dog and the dog looked thirsty so she gave it a plateful of beer.
“That guy was okay,” she comments now. “That guy I gave the olive to with the dog.”
“He’s taken,” says Joanie. “He’s a priest.”
“I didn’t say I wanted to marry him,” says Mary, kicking on her sandals. We set off across the field together, between the goal posts on the soccer field.
“We could do this again,” I say when we’ve reached the parking lot, but then I step on a rock and the salad bowl slides from my arms and lands upside down on the pavement. Everyone watches as I pick it up. There’s a lopsided yellow mound of potato salad with a fly already buzzing at the edge of it.
“Oh god,” I moan. “Poor Tim.”
“Come on,” Mary calls. “Don’t worry your pretty head about Tim.”
She’s drunk. Just a little. There’s an edge to her voice that I’ve heard all along and not, until just now, taken to heart. Anger. Already at the threshold, she’s got the screen door propped against her legs, and the picnic basket wedged between her elbow and hip, and one hand in her pocket feeling for keys, and one hand in the air for balance.
The Anniversary
It is a Friday evening, far too hot for early September. The humidity has been building since noon, and everyone seems pleased with the rainy forecast for the weekend. They talk of rain as if it were a loved one coming home after an absence. Of course the air conditioning is out; Martha dreads the moment when the conductor calls her stop and she’ll have to stand up, yanking the backs of her thighs from the vinyl seat like two Band-Aids torn from a wound. She is wearing her tennis dress, not what she usually wears on the LIRR but she had planned a game with Gloria after work. Gloria hadn’t shown up. Martha dropped her dime in the club phone, calling. Her hands were trembling. She phoned Gloria’s office, but nobody answered. Then she phoned Gloria’s home, but her daughter picked up the phone, so Martha kept silent, not wanting to worry her. Maybe something has happened to Gloria. Maybe Gloria is lying on a subway platform. More likely Gloria stopped for a drink and forgot their date, which is just as well because it’s too hot for tennis. Martha is glad for an excuse to wear her tennis dress home on the train, instead of her suit and stockings and high-heeled shoes. She is comfortable in her tennis shoes, her bare ankles, her bare arms. The tennis dress is appliquéd with daisies.
When the conductor calls out Hicksville she shuts her eyes. An ancient habit. Six years ago Tom divorced her and moved to Hicksville with a girl who played the piano. The girl was twenty-two, and Martha has never been given the satisfaction of seeing her. Still, when she imagines her, she sees her from behind, seated upright on a piano bench, her hair swept up and fastened with a wicker clip, the pale floral folds of her skirt falling nearly to the floor, her long fingers dancing on the ivory keys. She must have long fingers if she plays the piano. She is still twenty-two, still playing Elton John. The two of them live in a tiny house, one of those identical houses you see from the tracks in Hicksville. The houses are gracious and have parlors in them. Tom drinks scotch; a decanter is filled with the amber liquid. Martha doesn’t know which house is theirs, but she is certain it is one of those houses that line the tracks. They are all alike. It doesn’t matter which is theirs. Frequently, above the screech and whine of the train, she hears the faint sweet cadence of notes being struck on a piano.
“Must be a hundred degrees on this train,” says a young woman sitting next to her. She is sweating and reading a newspaper and she smells of deodorant. Martha is always glad when a woman sits near her instead of a man. Once on this same train, years ago as a newlywed, she dropped her handkerchief in the lap of a man who was sleeping. It was a hot evening, like this one, but in June when she knew she was pregnant, and she wiped the sweat from her face and somehow let go of the handkerchief so it floated to the man’s crotch. She couldn’t bring herself to pick it up. She remembers staring at it nervously from the corner of her eye. When he wakes up, she told herself, I’ll say, “Excuse me but I seem to have dropped my handkerchief.” She rehearsed the phrase a million times. “Excuse me but I seem to have dropped my handkerchief,” with a discreet tilt of her head toward his lap. But then he grunted in his sleep and tucked in his shirttails. He tucked the handkerchief right into his pants so only a lacy corner remained visible over the belt.
She felt guilty about that for years. She had a vision of the man going home to his wife, chatting with her in the bedroom while he undressed, first his sweaty shirt, then his pants, then the handkerchief falling to the floor at his feet. How could he explain? Martha imagines them going through life, their marriage irreparably altered, a bitter air of puzzlement between them. She wonders what became of her handkerchief. Lately, thinking about it, she finds herself laughing. The laughter is deep in her belly but genuine. She wonders how something that once seemed so cruel has turned funny. She imagines she has grown full of spite.
Shifting in her seat, Martha edges toward the window and crosses her legs so the open newspaper no longer brushes against them. She wishes it were winter. In winter, at dusk, the view from the train is not nearly so dim. There is snow and the light hits it, and maybe there are snowflakes whirling and falling, fine dry flakes so the air is filmy and white. She would get home, start a fire, sit with a book and a glass of wine until she felt hungry or sleepy. She is proud of the fireplace. They both were proud of the fireplace when they bought the house; set into the wall between the living and dining rooms, it opens onto both. It is the saving grace of the house, which is split-level and ordinary, part of a development in which the houses are mirror images of one another. When they purchased the lot, they requested a house in which the kitchen and garage faced south, the bedrooms north. The builder mixed up. He built the house backward, so the kitchen faces north; when you walk in, the stove and sink are on the left. She felt turned around, misplaced, as if she were cooking in somebody else’s kitchen. The open fireplace made everything better. When Tom moved out, she made a point of building herself a fire every night when it was cool, and eating d
inner on the couch while her son sat close by on the floor, his salad plate clinking on the slate of the hearth. She looked past him through the flames at the shadows moving on the pine-paneled walls of the dining room, and asked about his day. She likes to think of herself as a good mother, a friend. Her son is named Tom. He looks like Tom. She loves her son but has never been able to like him.
Now, because it is dark, and summer, she sees only the reflection of her own face in the window of the train, It is a plain, calm face, lined around the mouth, with ice-blue eyes that she avoids looking into directly. Today is her anniversary. She and Tom were married eighteen years ago today, in the chapel of a country club with velveteen paintings hung on its walls, and then they went to Portugal. Tom wanted to see a bullfight, but Martha couldn’t stomach the idea of watching as an animal was killed, so they compromised. In Portugal the fighters only tease the bull and stick him with darts but don’t murder him. They saw four fights in a week. There was much fuss made in the arena; the matadors and picadors marching around in fancy brocades, waving cloaks and weapons, and then the furious bull snorting and heaving and bowing toward the crowd. The crowd seemed subdued. Children cried and were slapped. By the end of each show, when the frustrated bull was led from the ring, he was decorated with his own blood, scarlet threads that swung from his slippery back. Tom smiled and went on stomping his feet. Leaving Portugal, in a cab on the way to the airport, Martha put a question to the driver, who spoke some English. “Why do the people of your country seem so sad?” she asked. Then she wished she hadn’t, because he turned toward her and stopped watching the road. “They’re not sad,” he said. “They’re just unhappy.”
“I am not sad,” she tells herself now, her face mouthing the words back at her from the window. “I am just unhappy.” She thinks of her son. Tom Junior was born sad. Sadness is in his genes and he cannot shake it off; it’s like a rotten name you have to live with. He is on his way home for the weekend, this minute, on the Throg’s Neck Bridge in that broken-down car he played with all summer, both hands on the wheel, trembling. Traffic scares him. A lot of things frighten him. When he was very small she took him to the beach and put her bathing cap on and he screamed and ran away from her. Things like that. People pick on him. He phoned her last night from the state college in Oneonta where he has just started his first year. “Mom,” he said. “I’m coming home a little while.” He explained that he and his roommates, three other boys with whom he shared a suite in the dormitory, weren’t getting along. Martha wondered, what does he mean they’re not getting along? Are they all not getting along with each other, or are the three of them simply not getting along with him? “But they were matched with you on a computer,” she found herself saying. “You had to fill out that form and they matched you up with those boys on a computer.”
“It’s a piece of trash,” Tom said. He had pulled himself together. “Their computer’s worthless. Everyone’s switching roommates. Anyway I’m coming home. I’ll go back Monday but I have to come home.”
He hadn’t mentioned the anniversary so she supposed he had forgotten about it. Previously they celebrated it together, just the two of them, just to have something to celebrate. They sat at the table in the dining room and ate a nice dinner and bad-mouthed Tom Senior and laughed. She liked to hear him poke fun at his father’s tightfistedness. No money had been forthcoming to pay for his schooling. Or for his harmonicas. Tom Junior has six harmonicas, each tuned to a different key, and they cost fifteen dollars apiece and Tom Senior has not paid for a single one of them. That always gets a good laugh. But her son makes a habit, during these dinners, of trying to convince her to go out with other men. Some men have tried to get close to her over the years but she’s turned them down. The idea of getting stuck with any one of them seemed ludicrous. Sometimes she has difficulty thinking of these men as men and of herself as a woman.
Turning from the window. Martha sees that the young woman reading the paper has left. The newspaper, rolled up on the seat, has been secured with a red rubber band. She wonders what kind of a woman would put the rubber band back on her newspaper when she has finished reading it, and she plucks at the rubber band with her fingernail until noticing that there is nobody else on the train with her. A heavy silence clings to the heat. The train has reached the last stop, her stop. She gathers her things, her tennis bag with the racket zipped to the outside, stuffed so tightly with her suit and blouse and high-heeled shoes that she couldn’t quite close it, and her shopping bag with the Entenmann’s cakes she bought at a bakery close to the office. She hunts for her purse. For a minute she thinks she has misplaced it but then she finds it in the shopping bag along with the cakes. She opens it and takes out her hairbrush. Her hair has recently been cut and shaped, so when she brushes it has a pleasant bounce. She brushes for a long time, keeping an eye on the sliding door to the compartment. Any minute, someone will come through and kick her out. She thinks if she still smoked cigarettes she would smoke one now. Then she stands up, and her thighs make that harsh sound as they are peeled from the vinyl seat.
The station platform is bare, bathed in a yellow light from the tall naked lamps that line the tracks. Because the train pulled in from the west, she is on the wrong side and has to climb the tinny steps to the footbridge that crosses over. But the air is damp and smoky and on the bridge it seems fresher; there is a breeze up there that smells of leaves.
Her car is parked in the long-term lot beyond the rows of cabs and the circular drive, in the dark. She is glad about the dark because suddenly she feels silly in the tennis dress. Her shoes make no sound as she crosses the pavement. At the car she stops, puts her things on the ground, bends over and rummages in the Entenmann’s bag for her purse and keys. When she stands up there’s a man with a hand on her shoulder. “Tom!” she says, because his face is in darkness and she thinks maybe her son has surprised her at the station, but it is not Tom because the man has a knife and has raised it to her throat.
“Lady,” he says. “You got your car keys, lady?”
What’s happening? she thinks, and throws the keys at his feet and ducks but he grabs her and makes her pick them up.
“I don’t want your damn car keys,” he says. “I want you to get in the car.”
“You want me to unlock the car,” she is saying. “You want me to get in the car,” because she has heard that if you talk to a mugger like a human being then maybe he won’t hurt you.
“Don’t hurt me,” she says.
“Very smart,” he says, because she is working the keys in the lock, shoving each key in and yanking it out and fumbling.
“I don’t have my car keys,” she says. Her teeth are chattering. “I must have…they must be,” but he slashes her skirt with his knife.
“Lady,” he says. “Do what I say.”
She opens the door and for a second they stand there and look into the dimly lit interior of the car and at a pack of cough drops lying on the seat.
“Get in,” he says.
She is thinking of the knife. She can think of nothing but the knife and the extraordinary noise it made when it cut into her skirt. Surely someone must have heard it, surely the cab drivers chatting in their smoky circle near the cabs heard it.
He has struck her arm, hard, with his fist, and she finds that she is seated in the car although she can’t think how she got there.
“Move over,” says the man.
He pushes her onto her back on the seat so her knee hits the steering wheel. The horn. The horn hasn’t worked for ages but she pushes against it anyway with her knee, hoping to get a sound out of it.
“Don’t kill me,” she says. “Don’t.”
He has climbed into the car. He is leaning over her with the knife poised between their two bodies and he is grinning. She sees that he is terribly young.
“Now,” he is saying.
“What?” she pleads. “Now what?” because she doesn’t know what he is talking about. He slashes at the skirt again
.
“Please,” she says. “What? What do you want? Take the keys. The car. Take it.”
“You know what I want.”
“I don’t. I don’t know.” Because she doesn’t. The cakes? The tennis racket? Why won’t he take it then and get away from her?
“Take it,” she says. “Don’t hurt me. Take what you want, I won’t stop you.”
But then there is the high wail of a police siren and the flashing red light as it pulls into the station drive.
After what seems like a long while she pulls herself up, gripping the steering wheel and pulling herself forward until her feet touch the pavement and she is sitting on the edge of the driver’s seat looking out into the parking lot. It was not a police car after all but an ambulance that is parked at the station entrance with the light still turning and the back doors open. She sits there dully and watches the commotion. Only after someone has been carried out on a stretcher and the back doors have been slammed shut and the ambulance has driven off with its siren screaming does she realize what it was he must have wanted from her.
“Oh god,” she says.
There is a bruise on her arm where he struck her and a spreading pain. Not much pain but she imagines it will get worse after a while as the shock wears off. She wonders if she is in shock. She doesn’t know. She doesn’t think so. She might call the police. There are phones in a row between the benches to the right of the station entrance. But she would have to walk through the parking lot to get to them. She thinks of screaming. If she screams, someone will come running and she can ask them to escort her to the telephones.
But what would she say to the police? There was this boy, and he pushed me into my car.
And she has nothing to show for it. Nothing but a slash here and there in the ridiculous pleated skirt of her tennis dress.
She pulls the Entenmann’s bag and her tennis bag into the car. She puts them on the passenger seat and searches for her keys. They are dangling from the door. Then she starts for home, forgetting to turn on the lights until she is halfway across the parking lot and realizes that it’s dark and she can’t see anything.