Yesterday, at the café on that busy boulevard, I wrote a notation concerning my feelings for the people in this world. I started writing the notation on a page in my workbook, but I felt the words too trite, so I crossed them out and rewrote in the margins of a cookbook abandoned on the small silver table holding milk and sweeteners.
An older man walked into the café while I rewrote. He stared at me and the cookbook before coughing and going to the counter. I again crossed out the notation and checked the quality of my pen against the surface of the table before inking there. This rewriting of the notation took more time than I had conceived because I kept adding things. While the notation itself was sound, below it I had to explain a little more so anyone reading it might understand the frightened words it held. And I was lucky to have the table because at times my penmanship ballooned and I needed a large space to contain myself.
On the table I told of a woman friend of a friend and her troubled past weeks. It started when she was hit by a car—luckily, a glancing blow. The driver left the scene, and as it happened early on a Sunday morning, when most people slept, she had no-one to console her. She went to the hospital, but they told her she was fine. There’s nothing wrong with me? she asked the nurses. No, nothing. This woman went home and called her sister. As she told her sister about the accident, the woman fell down the steps of her duplex. The sister wanted to know what had happened and she told her she’d had another accident and had just fallen down the steps. The woman went back to the hospital. Everything is hurting, she told them. Everything about me hurts. They examined her and told her it wasn’t that bad and she probably hadn’t needed to come to the hospital. Since her doctor was closed on Sundays, they could understand how she wanted to come to them, even though some people in her situation might not have bothered. Then they released her.
This woman went home and put on some chamber music—an album she hadn’t listened to in a while. The music, how it was interpreted and played, reminded her how moments in life could also be finely tuned. As the pieces swept aside her anxiety, she drank tea. When she walked into the kitchen to get more hot water, the limp she thought she had from the fall was not there. Tea and violins, tea and calm.
As the sky darkened, she began lighting candles for the appearance of her lover, a man white-haired and often lonely who used to belong to a radical political group. Lately, he had been overseas investigating a son in trouble, but he had returned, speaking proudly of the pie he would bake and bring her that evening. Yet this lover, this man, did not arrive at the appointed time or after, and the woman sunk into oblivion on her most cherished sofa, a five-year-old cranberry affair, a gift from her estranged father.
He has met someone else. He has grown tired of me. My body cannot charm him. These thoughts made up the rest of her evening, and, in between bouts of weeping, she pulled the covers from her bed and slept on the sofa.
The light in the morning was diffuse. A team of surveyors in bright orange uniforms had set up on her street and were talking loudly and laughing loudly. She closed her windows but could still hear them. They spoke their words in a thoughtlessly happy fashion, laughing the laugh of forgetfulness while making money.
She left the house.
The subway was crowded and she took the paperback she had finished last week out of her purse and began reading from the beginning. A mystery set in Lisbon with an element of romance. On the first read through she’d realized how badly written the book was, but this time it was painful. She closed it and stared at the list of coming stations on that line. She would travel to the end, stretching the system as far as it could go—she thought doing so would stop her mind. Along the way she concentrated on sounds: wheels on the tracks, the blowing of air vents, the tinny crashing of music from the headphones of a boy beside her. When she opened her eyes they seized on people’s shoes and the various conditions of the footwear. She had never consciously grasped how many different types existed. How many colors they came in. How at home patches of dirt seemed on some. How some had no laces and some had too many.
It continued on, this volley of sensory attentions in a world that had fooled her too many times. Soon, a couple of men in cowboy boots stepped on—both pairs brown, worn, and scuffed. The men did not sit. They had guitars. As soon as the doors closed, a storm of mariachi music began. It was as loud as music could be on the subway, and though the men sang with smiles, and though the music broadcast was cheerful and, if the phrases could be translated, probably joyful and promising, her stomach rose on alert and a terrific terror pinned her being. The men seemed to grow emboldened and inexplicably increased the volume of their instruments. Frozen, she endured for a moment, but soon a heat circled her ears. Putting her hands to them only made them hotter. Her arms fell to her sides and she tipped her torso, too sick to be straight. She stopped the tipping but was sure blood would run from her ears. The song continued, the longest song in the largest space between stations in the system. How could it have happened this way? The man not singing grinned at her, his broken teeth glazed with spit. Though she kept her face closed to his happiness, something cracked inside her. She curled her wrists and coughed hard not to feel the cracking, but she did, nothing could stop it. She opened her mouth for her own sounds to comfort her but she couldn’t produce them. The men’s thick fingers slapped at their guitars, and for the first time she could remember, she had no light in her life.
After the train stopped, she staggered off and went up the stairs into the cloudy morning. Near the edge of the city, she soon came upon a park with a large lagoon. At its edge she examined the green twisting water with flecks of leaves and twigs. She startled as test sirens went off in the distance, and looked to others walking nearby. They seemed to know to ignore it. When she returned to the water, it remained much the same. Folding and unfolding forms of muddied time. Look at it all, so simple, so wise—the earth peed this.
She sat by the bank. After the sirens died she couldn’t hear any noise except the momentary flick of her tongue trying to talk, but who would receive her speech? The grass under her hands smelled rained upon. The cold lagoon water shifting in and out of cold and in and out of warm. She was incredibly alone.
Later, she walked by the boathouse, an off-white structure with peeling paint. More and more people were coming to this large building, entering the snack bar or knocking on the rental office windows. The canoes and kayaks were now ready to use. Maybe there would be sun. She crept onto the narrow pier, often looking back as she proceeded, then glancing from side to side at the green water.
Back on land she watched a father and son walking on the macadam path ringing the lagoon. Something had just happened between them because their heads were down and they walked slowly. She followed, having to make sure they were safe. The father was fairly young and fairly athletic, his shirt tight against his chest. His son had messy blond hair and a pale face. They were kind people, they’d lived a completely different life from her, but now they had a vanquished air. Such sadness would soon disappear. It couldn’t last long, with children it never did, or so she was told, and so she remembered, though she remembered wrongly. Sadness did stay with children. It stayed with them their whole lives.
The father walked to the edge of the path and took off his pack. The water bottle he handled was silver and blue. The boy shook his offer away and the man drank, a short sip. Then the boy clapped his cheeks before quickly facing in her direction, as if he’d known she’d been there. She couldn’t turn from him because the rest of her life depended on what he’d do next. Though the boy didn’t understand much, he could understand trouble and forgot her, walking closer to his father, closer and closer before he fell into the man—rubbing his way into a hold, laughing or crying at reunion, she couldn’t tell which.
Walking away, she dismissed what she’d witnessed. What other people did couldn’t matter to her. She had made it this far in life. One day she would meet someone special.
When I stepped away from the table, I felt a certain pleasure I’d known only a few times in life. I scanned my work, finding all the paragraph breaks and spellings to be sound. Not a single mistake in that thing.