The television show aimed to find the most miserable and deserving people in America and shower them with consumer goods: clothing, appliances, real estate. This week they had selected a woman with fourteen children. Four were her own and ten of them were her sister’s. The sister had died of cancer and there had been a deathbed promise. Husbands and fathers notable by their absence. Hah! Lynn raised her wineglass to the television. All those missing men. They probably had a secret clubhouse somewhere.
The family had been living in a dismal hotel. Things had gone badly for them and then had gotten worse. The kids seemed nice enough. The television hosts did their hopped-up best to yank at the heartstrings. How did it feel to be homeless, impoverished, exhausted, desperate? Huh? Huh? “Like holding on with one hand and about to let go,” said the mother, wiping tears. “Like bein’ at the bottom of the bottom.”
She switched the channel. It depressed her to think that in order to get any public sympathy she would need to have twelve more children.
Her younger son walked past the room and stopped to look in at the door. “What are you watching?”
“I don’t know, I just switched.” She knew he didn’t like it when she drank and so she said brightly, “Oh, it’s the History Channel.” Smudgy gray footage showed fighter pilots bombing a carrier. She patted the side of the bed. “Come sit for a minute.”
He picked a spot at the end of the bed. “Here,” she said, tossing him the remote. “Find something you like.”
It was just the two of them now. His older brother was away at college. His father had decamped. The empty house spoke of failure. Lynn knew her son felt sorry for her, in a way that embarrassed both of them. One more year of high school and he could leave also, breathe air that she had not breathed first.
She said, for the sake of saying something, “Did you get your track clothes washed?” He was on the cross-country team and spent all his free time training.
“Uh huh.”
“I wish I was fleet of foot. I’d bust out of here. I’d just keep running.”
“Like Forrest Gump, huh?”
“What?”
“The movie. The guy runs and runs and people all over the country start following him.”
“I don’t remember that part.” She didn’t trust herself to say more. The wine was making her bleary. One picture slid into the next as he changed channels, settling on a basketball game. She watched with him in silence, but it was hard for her to focus on the different teams, the back and forth. It was like the History Channel footage, another war she didn’t care about.
She must have fallen asleep. When she opened her eyes, the television was off and her son had gone. She had to get up for work in the morning. Piece of cake. One stupid foot in front of the other.
She was always nice to people at work. That part wasn’t
difficult. Nice was her default setting. She was agreeable,
sympathetic, interested. It had been her habit, but, Lynn was beginning to suspect, it was not her nature.
After work she called Christine. They were divorce friends. They were allowed to complain until the cows came home. “Last night was bad,” Christine said. “I baked a pan of brownies and ate them all.”
“Did it at least taste good?”
“Up to a point. Then it was just mindless, terrifying self-abuse.”
“Did you throw up or anything?” Lynn asked. It depressed her to think that this sort of thing was the worst they were guilty of these days.
“No, I passed out with the pan in my lap. Crumbs all over the sheets. It’ll probably draw roaches. How are you?”
“Okay.” She thought she’d skip the part about passing out herself. She hoped she hadn’t drooled or snored in front of her son. “Do you anybody who has ten children? Or twelve, or fourteen?” She explained about the television program.
“Were they polygamists?” Christine asked.
“I’m thinking no.”
“If one of us finds a man, we should both marry him. Sorry. What about the show?”
“I disliked those people. Even the kids. I really did. I disliked them for being poor and wretched and I couldn’t believe that woman kept popping out children. I mean, hello, birth control?”
“It is sort of like the old woman who lived in a shoe.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the point. What’s wrong with me? The whole idea of the show is, you feel sorry for them. You’re supposed to laugh and cry with them and be all happy when they get their new house. And here I am thinking rotten thoughts.” She did not say rotten racial thoughts, although there had been some of that; the family was black.
“Oh, it’s just television,” Christine said. “You shouldn’t take any of it personally. Want to do something this weekend? Go see a goopy movie or something?”
Lynn said sure. Sometimes they actually went to the movie. Or else one of them said they were too tired, or too busy, and they stayed home. They were supposed to be moving forward with their lives. That was the message of all the self-help books and television therapists. As if all anybody ever needed was good advice.
Christine said, “I’ve started buying a lot of magazines. Interior decorating and Southern cooking and travel and crafts and country living. It’s something about the pictures. All those beautiful rooms and fancy cakes. I can’t get enough of them.”
“It’s better for you than the brownies,” Lynn said. She didn’t buy magazines now because the divorce had exploded everyone’s finances and magazines were frivolous purchases. But she looked at them when she went through the grocery checkout line. She was drawn to the ones that showed movie stars and teen princesses on the covers, like giant, pouting paper dolls. Her Untold Story! one of the headlines blared, because interesting and tragic things were always happening to famous people in terms of their fertility, their sweethearts, their drugs. You weren’t meant to confuse such things with real life, and she didn’t. Didn’t expect or want to end up on any magazine cover herself. But what if her life was already used up, and she didn’t even have a story anymore?
She said good-bye to Christine, hung up the phone and went out to the patio. The long spring twilight gathered on the lawn and beneath the trees. The sky was opal, the air was scented with blossom and mown grass. She was going to have to buy more birdseed for her complex of bird feeders. Once you started, you were supposed to keep feeding them. There was no end to their exhausting needs. Across the back fence, her neighbors’ kitchen lights were on, and her heart hurt at the welcoming yellow light against the clear sky. Anything lovely made her feel excluded, envious, melancholy.
Her son was spending the night at friends’. This was what the house would be like once he’d gone away to school. She sat down at the computer, checked email, then logged into the Men Looking for Women portion of the singles’ website. She was too chickenshit to post anything herself, but she liked to check out the men and assure herself she wasn’t missing anything. There was something wrong with all of them; too old, too young, too arrogant, liked country music, smoker, grammar errors. It made instant rejection easy. She clicked on one post she hadn’t seen before. The dim picture showed a smallish man with a moustache, his face blurred from the light of the window. Hello, my name is Allejandro and I am 58 years old. In the day I am a mechanic and in the night I am lonely. I speak some English but Spanish is better.
If only he spoke no English at all. That would be perfect. She could make a gift of herself, show up at his door wrapped in ribbon and bows. Here you go, Allejandro. Congratulations. You’ve been selected. It would be like the television show, except without the home remodeling part. She would transform his life. They would be happy. At least, until he decided he preferred someone younger and more kittenish, as her ex-husband had.
His new wife was pregnant. Did she really wish some gruesome tragedy on them, a dead or deformed child? Was she that far gone, the wicked fairy at the christening? No, not yet. She did allow herself to hope that the new wife would get fat.
She had been divorced for more than a year now. But there had been a couple of years before that when she had not been entirely married either. Her husband’s skulking affair had gone on for some time before Lynn discovered it, and then there had been the hanging-on, the long process of trying to convince Jay that he didn’t really want what he wanted. Then, by the end, when Lynn had been worn down, defeated, willing to bargain, when she’d said, fine, keep her, do whatever makes you happy, but let’s stay married, it turned out that what he really wanted was Not Her.
The other day she’d seen a man wearing a T-shirt that said, choose one: a. i don’t know. b. i don’t care. Maybe the universe was sending her messages. She could cultivate a posture of hostile indifference. She could get some therapy. She could file her teeth into spikes, roll around on the ground until her hair trailed leaves and twigs. She was not moving forward. She was at the bottom of the bottom.
The phone rang. She saw from the handset that it was Jay’s number. There were occasions, all of them unpleasant, when they had to speak to each other. She thought about not answering, decided it was better to get it over with. “What do you want?”
A space of flat silence. Then he said, “That’s a nice way to start a conversation.”
She didn’t respond. Petty rudeness was the only weapon she still had against him. After a moment he said, “How are the boys?”
“Why should I know more about them than you do?”
He didn’t answer that. How could he? He’d divorced his sons too. He was Dad 2.0 now. Corrects flaws in earlier versions. He said, “We need to talk about Tim’s tuition next year.”
The hair on the back of her neck prickled. “Mm,” she said.
“I’m not going to be able to cover the whole thing. I’m just stretched too thin.”
“Wow, Jay. I completely understand and sympathize.”
“I don’t think that tone is very helpful.”
It hadn’t taken long for his own tone to acquire that edge of surly grievance. He was crushed and dragged down by her unreasonableness.
“You know, Jay, between the two boys, there’s eight years of college to finance. We’ve just gotten through the first one.”
“Yeah.” She heard the faint clink of ice cubes in a glass. She wasn’t the only one drinking in the evenings. “That’s why I thought we ought to come up with some kind of plan now.”
“The plan was you’d pay for the boys’ education.”
“I am. I will. But I have other responsibilities now. I need a little flexibility.”
“Say, how flexible is Margot? I mean, when she’s not great with child. Can she really put her ankles all the way behind her ears?”
“Something very sad has happened to you, Lynn.”
“If you’re not going to pay for Tim’s college, you tell him that. Explain to him how your new family’s so much more absorbing than your old one. You tell him, hot shot. I’m through being your translator and mediator. It’s not worth the effort to try and understand you anymore.”
Jay started to say something, but she slammed the phone down. College expenses were in the divorce agreement. She’d sic the lawyer on him. She’d take off his skin piece by piece. She started crying, a noisy, open-mouthed crying, then stopped abruptly. Nothing she did made any difference. Cry or not cry. Who cared.
When her son came home the next morning, she said, “Tell me how I’d start training to run. What’s the first thing?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No editorial comments. What do I have to do, stretch?”
“What’s this all for?” He didn’t like it when she got excited about something. “You mean, show you right now?”
Yes, she said, right now. And so he led her through a basic warm-up. Side stretches, overheads, hamstrings, calves, quads. “Can you do sit-ups?”
She could, a few at least. Then she fell back on the floor, muscles wincing, out of breath. Her son loomed over her. “You’re sure this is a good idea, Mom?”
She wasn’t, but she went to the mall and bought a pair of serious shoes, some running shorts, and a sports bra. She was pretty sure that spending money would make her actually see it through. Back home she found some T-shirts that were big enough to cover most of the shorts. She wasn’t fat or saggy. She was just shy about her body because no one else had any use for it now.
The next day after work she dutifully stretched, then drove to a nearby park where it was acceptable to do this sort of thing. There was a trail that circled around some tennis courts, then looped away into a hillier, forested area. There were already a few serious-looking runners moving along the track, men with nearly anatomical thighs and sports water bottles.
Lynn parked, got out, stretched again. A couple of kids were playing tennis, making crisp, ponging sounds as the ball hit. No one was paying any attention to her. She launched herself forward.
It felt unnatural, peg-legged. Her hip joints hurt. Each step jostled her breathing so she couldn’t get air all the way into her lungs. She got around the track twice, then limped over to a bench.
She’d never see forty again. What was she thinking, she was going to turn into some Kenyan marathoner? Her muscles shrieked. So maybe it was a stupid idea, but it was the only idea she’d had in a long time. She sat for awhile and watched the tennis players. They were horsing around now, hitting smash shots into the net, chasing down balls they had no hope of returning. Sunsets were getting later each day, minute by minute. The topmost leaves caught the last horizontal rays and blazed gold. She was able to observe, without feeling tragic, that it was a nice evening.
The next day at work Lynn listened as Mike and Rigo went through their usual morning routine of scorn and putdowns. Rigo was a Cubs fan. Mike, the Cardinals. Or maybe it was the other way around. She so often lost track.
“Some weak-shit pitching. He got the arm of a little che-ild.”
“Says you. You guys are gonna have your usual season. El-foldo. Saving the worst for last.”
“Yeah, yeah, big talk. Little bitty bats.”
“Ah, you characters wear rubbers for hats.”
“Guys?” said Lynn, and they looked up, surprised, having forgotten she was there. “Explain to me why it’s so important. This team, that team. What difference does it make? A hundred years from now, will it matter to anybody?”
Now they looked at each other. Rigo, all biceps and nostrils. Mike and his flaccid blond good looks. “Seriously?” Mike asked.
“I’m trying to understand the man thing. After all these years, it’s still a foreign language.”
Rigo said, “When you’re a fan, you have a passion in your life. I know everything my team does, every player, coach, manager. I know all their stats. I know what they did last year and the year before that and the year before that. When my team wins, I win.”
“The players are the last warriors. Used to be, men would go out and do battle, do hard and bloody things, stand or fall by their actions. It was that simple. These days, life is way too complicated.”
“Your team, man, it makes you feel alive, when everything else in your world beats you down.”
Mike said, “My team is like me, but better. They live large. People know their names, care about them. They’re on television. They are cool.”
“Yeah, but my guys are cooler than your guys.”
“Oh right, like your guys aren’t crying their way straight to the bottom of the league.”
“It’s gonna be a long season for you, isn’t it?”
“Oh, what a putdown. I’m dyin’.”
Lynn said, “Okay, thanks, this is very helpful. But why does somebody always have to win or lose?”
Again they looked at each other. They were both on the same team now, and she was only the lady who smiled and sometimes brought cookies in to the office. She was nice but totally out of it. Rigo said, “I guess it’s an evolution thing. Like sperm have to beat out all the other sperm.”
“Ick.”
“Hey, you asked.”
That night on the way home she saw a bumper sticker: it’s better to have loved and lost than to live with a psycho the rest of your life. Another message from the universe. Not that Jay was a psycho. Just a pig. Then there was the loved and lost part, which also required some thought, since, if she was honest, there had been more loss than love. She hadn’t liked losing. Maybe she was more like the sports fans than she cared to admit, except that no one else was on her team.
Still, she liked the bumper sticker’s spunky attitude. Maybe she was the psycho it was better to live without. Psycho wives, unite! At home she changed into her running clothes and drove to the park. She managed to go four times around the track, then walked two more laps to cool out.
Christine said, “Tony called. He sounded lonesome.” Tony was her ex. “He kept me on the phone a long time, for no real reason.”
“Oh, I bet there was a reason,” Lynn said. “A reason will rear its ugly head.”
“Don’t be so negative. Maybe he just wanted to talk to me.”
“You suck,” Christine said. “Why can’t you even pretend that this might be a good sign?”
“I am pretending. Honest.”
“Is there any fried rice left? Gimme.”
Lynn passed her the take-out carton. They were in Christine’s kitchen, eating Chinese food and ice cream. Christine, like Lynn, was a house widow. Both of them still inhabited the homes of their marriages, overlarge and expensive suburban money pits. Christine’s lawn, Lynn had noticed, was looking feathery and untended, even this early in the season. It was possible to mourn, in the abstract, the loss of those suburban men who marched behind lawnmowers and spent their weekends spraying and clipping and wielding power tools.
Christine poked at the empty carton. A tidal residue of grease and rice grains coated the sides. “I’m going to get control of the food thing. I’m serious. I can’t stand my naked body. I bet nobody else could either.” She had gained a lot of divorce weight. All her pants had elastic waistbands now.
“Any fish bites if you got good bait.”
“This isn’t about Tony. I’m thinking, all those fish in the sea.”
“Sure,” Lynn said. Of course it was about Tony. Christine still had those hopes. Tony had not remarried. He had wanted a divorce so that he could be his own person. Lynn could see how it would all turn out. Christine would diet, turn sleek and catlike, take Tony back again. Christine would become a happy person and would listen with cheerful remoteness to Lynn’s sad-sack complaints. “Here,” Lynn said, pushing another carton across the table. “Kung pao chicken. All yours.”
“No thanks. Where are the fortune cookies? I can eat one of those. They have about zero calories.”
“I’m not going to even read mine. I don’t want to know my fortune.”
“Then I’ll read yours for you.” Christine got up to get the fortune cookies from the counter. She was wearing sweatpants with the drawstring untied and she used one hand to hold them up. “All right, here, this one’s mine: Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.”
“Hmm.”
“Yeah, like, comic books. Here’s yours: You will soon be more aware of your growing awareness. That’s a little tricky.”
“Would you really want Tony back again? After everything he put you through?”
“You don’t like him. You never did.”
“So you’re saying, yes.”
Christine flicked some rice off her sweater. “Look at that. I should just pour a bottle of Crisco oil over my head. So Tony’s not perfect. I don’t think anybody perfect is going to come my way. I don’t think anybody else is going to come my way, period. What am I supposed to do for the rest of my stupid life?”
“I know, hon.”
“Do you? I mean, of course you do, but you’re pretty, you don’t have to be alone if you don’t want to. You’ll find somebody sooner or later. Me, it’s either Tony or somebody who’ll murder me for a life insurance policy.”
Once, at a dinner party, Tony had spent some time instructing Lynn on the basics of the stock market, using salad plates and dinner plates as props. “See, this little plate here is an individual stock, and the big one is your mutual fund portfolio. See how all the little guys fit into the big one?”
It was hard not to have an opinion. It was hard to remember what a nice person would do. Lynn said, “I could definitely see you and Tony together again.”
“You think?”
“See what happens. Be brave.”
“Do me a favor, take the ice cream home with you. Oh come on, a shrimp like you? I could eat Weight Watchers ten times a day and never be that skinny.”
On her way home Lynn detoured to drive past Jay’s new house. She guessed that if she kept doing this, there would eventually be some kind of restraining order. Jay and Margot had purchased a woodsy, faux chalet in a desirable district. The house had architecturally significant features and a stained glass oriole window. Maybe she could nibble off a chunk of it, like a gingerbread house, and use it for the boys’ college expenses. She rolled slowly past, noting the dim light in the no doubt spacious kitchen, and the illuminated upstairs window where Jay massaged his pregnant bride’s swollen feet. Or consulted with her over the hipster version of What to Name the Baby. (Elijah? Paola?) Or any of the other things he’d never done with her. By now she had imagined and catalogued all manner of painful scenarios, sexual and otherwise.
She turned a corner and veered around the block to make a second pass. Stupid and degrading behavior. How long did she intend to keep it up? The child would be born, learn to walk, head off for school, develop questionable friendships. The saplings in the yard would grow to mighty shade trees. The neighbors would wave at her as she made her rounds. Jay would be balding and fiercely deaf. She would have long ago forgotten the different layers of their life together: love, married struggle, boredom, acrimony, but still her curses would gather round him like crows on a wire.
Lynn changed directions and headed home. What could you tell from the outside of a house anyway? Wouldn’t her own look just as peaceful and welcoming, no matter how forlorn the life inside it was? She was tired of chewing on her own black heart.
Back home, she sat down at the computer and went to the singles website. She needed a nom de guerre, an email handle with which to conduct naughty transactions. AngerMom. SweetnSassy. ExurbPrincess. She settled for the tamer Ladybird400 (ladybirds 1 through 399 presumably spoken for), and after some effort, composed her post:
Hi, I’m a DWF, 43, 5’3” and slim, looking for a friend/soul mate to share quiet evenings in or dinners out, conversation, laughs, daytrips, etc. Please be employed, available, grown-up, sane. Shall we dance?
Lynn lingered a long moment over the Send button. On the margin of the site, a red banner flashed: find your fun and only! Fun and only? Who wrote this stuff? What further indignities would be required of her? Oh love, love, why do you choose a fool’s disguise? She hit Send.
Within twelve hours, she had multiple responses. A couple seemed, well, nuts, from men who claimed they felt an instant and deep connection with her, or provided detailed accounts of the character flaws of previous girlfriends. Another asked, broodingly, why she thought dancing was so important. Did she have something against people who didn’t dance?
Some sent pictures. These were disappointing. Life, or maybe genetics, had been unkind. There was a reason, Lynn decided, that people paired off when they were young, before they began molting and shedding. There was a gentleman who described himself as a “sprightly seventy” and who hinted at his financial generosity. Discouraged, Lynn clicked the screen away. There might be a lot of fish in the sea, but the waters were fraught and murky.
The next time she checked, there were a couple of more promising answers. A pharmaceutical salesman, a man who described himself as “part-time poet, part-time airline pilot.” Both had hopeful, presentable faces. Lynn wrote back to each of them, enclosing her own picture and a few words of attempted goodwill.
The poet-pilot wrote back: Hey, I’m new at this too. Awkward, isn’t it? If you’re free for lunch on Saturday, we can share a meal and some mutual embarrassment.
She was free. She screwed her courage to the sticking point, made the date. It felt like arranging a drug deal or embarrassing surgery.
The pharmaceutical salesman never wrote again. Were you allowed to feel spurned? Was any of this real? Were people even who they said they were? Was she? She examined her photograph, which portrayed her smiling, with apparent delight, at nothing at all. It was the face she always made for cameras, a dazzling grimace. Age showed in the corners of her eyes and the corners of her mouth. This was her avatar, her image, the face that attracted some and, it seemed, repelled others. Somewhere behind it her flesh-and-blood self lurked, ready to shriek, attack, devour.
She went running at the park. Her wind was better by now, and she could manage twenty minutes’ worth of laps, even if she was the slowest one out there. She took it as a good sign. Her great leap forward and upward!
Saturday came. What to wear for her big-deal date? Something that wouldn’t make her son suspect what she was doing. Something you wouldn’t mind getting stood up in. It was possible that the poet-pilot would lose his nerve or change his mind, or, observing her from the safety of the parking lot, put his car into gear and drive away. It was possible that she would do the same. Lynn chose some nice pants and a sweater, her raciest peep-toe shoes, some of her boring jewelry. Perhaps she should update and reinvent herself. She was the very model of a Michigan matron, as a careless ex-friend told her once. She would grow her hair out, wear leopard print and gypsy hoops.
At the restaurant she spotted him right away. He both did and did not look like his online picture, just as she guessed she did and did not resemble hers. His name was Scott. He was tall, stoop-shouldered, with a narrow, eager face and a bit of shining scalp poking up through his sandy hair. They shook hands. He laughed. “See,” he said, “that wasn’t so hard.” Lynn agreed. He had a jerky, tootling laugh. She was already keeping score, adding up and subtracting points.
The restaurant was busy, noisy. It was one of those places where you stood in line to order your food, but they sat down first, feeling the need to get some conversation out of the way. Scott hitched his chair closer to let a woman with a laden tray pass behind him. He said, “Is this place okay? It’s not fancy or anything.”
“It’s fine.” The last thing she wanted was fancy.
“You’re sure? I mean, we can go somewhere else if you want.”
“No, this is great. Really.” He seemed to need reassurance. “They have good sandwiches.”
“Yeah, they do.” Scott. She had to remember his name. His hands had big, arthritic-looking knuckles. She tried not to look at them, or any other part of him. She hadn’t been on a date in more than twenty-five years. She had forgotten everything about it. “I like their soups too,” Scott added. “Or maybe it’s a little warm for soup.”
“No, soup’s good anytime.” Oh, let’s be awkward. She tried another conversational lurch. “You’re a commercial pilot?”
He laughed his jerky laugh again. Something funny? No, just a kind of tic. “That’s right. I was with Northwest for fifteen years, then I was furloughed, then I got on with ATA. Then they went under. The whole industry’s consolidating.”
“Yes, it is,” Lynn said. Had he just told her he was unemployed? So much for conversation about the exciting life of a pilot. “I can’t remember the last time I flew,” she offered.
“Yeah, so it goes.” He let his gaze make a circuit of the room, then turned back to Lynn with another antic face. “Kind of puts the ‘real’ in real life.”
Was it time for her to offer up a personal failure of her own? Was he waiting for her to start? She opened her mouth, reconsidered, closed it again. Scott watched her losing fight with her tongue, then said, “If you know what you want to get, I’ll go order it.”
“Chicken pesto sandwich, side of chips, lemonade. Thanks.” She watched as he made his way up to the counter. He didn’t look like a pilot, or a laid-off pilot, but presumably the uniforms did a lot for them. Of course there was the poetry component too, but she wasn’t anxious to talk poetry with him. He was okay. Just that. She couldn’t pretend excitement, but maybe you weren’t supposed to be excited. That was for younger people. Graying, discouraged moms and pops were meant to match up their mutual interests and personality profiles, shrug off the inevitable disappointment. Did Scott have any children? Had he ever been married? It seemed like something she should have remembered from the ad. His stooped, angular figure moved patiently through the line. He wore a shrunken-looking blue polo shirt with yellow stripes. It wasn’t the sort of thing a skinny guy should wear. It was awful to think of him picking out this shirt, regarding himself in the mirror, deciding he looked all right.
Then he was back, carrying her lemonade and a Coke for himself. “Look what they give you,” he said, showing her something that resembled a television remote control. “It buzzes when your order’s ready.”
“Amazing, all the trouble they’ve gone to so they could replace waitresses. I’m sorry, I really can’t remember if your ad mentioned this, but were you married, ever?”
“A long time ago. Just out of college. I guess I should have put it in the ad, but honestly, sometimes I have to remind myself of it. Like it happened to some different person. So you . . .”
“I was married for more than twenty years. Divorced about one. I have two boys. How about you, any kids?”
“Not that I know of.” Oh, funny. Lynn had an ever-expanding collection of things she told her sons never to say, and that crack was one of them. The remote control thing began buzzing in an angry, peremptory way. “Excuse me.” He got up.
She looked out the window, scanning the parking lot, thinking vaguely of escape. The car pulled up just outside had a license plate that read gonogo 7. The universe wasn’t giving her much direction today.
“Here you are.” He set the plates down and they got busy with the mechanics of napkins and forks. He asked her how her sandwich was and she said it was good, and then he said his was good also. She would be nice to him, which was not the same as being a genuinely benevolent human being.
“So, who did you end up marrying?”
Lynn finished her bite of sandwich, swallowed it down. “Excuse me?”
“I was just wondering, what was your husband like?”
He was smiling again. Lynn decided not to. “He isn’t dead or anything.”
“Sorry. Just doing the cut-to-the-chase thing. Diagnostics. You know, learning from the errors of the past so as to start afresh.”
He ducked his head, a little self-deprecating movement. What to make of him? She wasn’t sure. There was that laugh. The unfortunate shirt, the fake smiling. A cloud was forming over his head and the cloud said, Loser. Lynn said, “For now, let’s just say there was plenty of blame to go around.” She didn’t really believe that. Jay was a slime devil.
“Takes two to tango, huh.” He worked a couple bites of his sandwich and swallowed them down. He was watching her with some private amusement, as if she had food stuck in her teeth. He was on the creepy side of awkward, Lynn decided. If he was a pilot, she wouldn’t want to be on his plane.
Fifteen minutes. Twenty, tops. Then she could say how nice it was to meet him and scuttle back to her burrow. She would ask him about his interesting hobbies. No doubt he had some. She was formulating a remark when he said, “You don’t remember me, do you?”
Her insides curdled. She stared at him. His face meant nothing to her. “No,” she said, waiting to be ambushed.
“Scott Hallberg.” Lynn shook her head. “We were in French III and IV at NIU. You used to read the books in English first so you wouldn’t have to translate everything. The Red and the Black. The Charterhouse of Parma. Madame Bovary.”
She didn’t remember reading them in either language. She didn’t remember anybody who might have turned into this guy. She said, “I’m sorry, were we, what, study pals?”
“No, we just like, knew each other from class.” Lynn could tell that he had counted on her remembering him. His smirking edge was gone. “I saw your picture and right away I figured out it was you.”
Lynn murmured that it really was a long time ago. Now she was trying to recollect some scrap of French, which also seemed to have fled her brain. Ou est la biblioteque? Je me demande.
“I was just wondering if you married your boyfriend from back then. You know, the hockey player.”
“Richard?” Him she did remember. He had been a famous alcoholic. “No, it was somebody I met later.” At least it wasn’t Richard sitting across from her and claiming acquaintance. That thought made her more cheerful. “Were you a French major? You weren’t a pilot or anything in school, were you?”
“God, I was so crazy about you. I mean nuts.”
Some kind of nervous, unlovely giggle made her throat spasm. “Huh huh,” she said.
“You never even had a clue. I mean, why would you, who was I? Some jerk in French class.”
“I honestly don’t remember—”
“No, of course you don’t. Girls like you don’t have to pay attention to anybody you don’t want to.”
“What do you mean, girls like me?” She was getting over some of her first creeped-out shock, and she didn’t much like his tone, whiny and aggrieved, as if he’d been carrying a grudge against her all this time, and what exactly was it she’d done to deserve him turning up now, the blind date from hell? “French class? Who remembers stuff like that?”
“Okay, okay, sorry.” Now he was backpedaling, less sure of himself. “But hey, don’t you think it’s weird, that we both end up in the same place?”
“Yes, weird.” Her memory was spotty, vague, like a movie seen underwater. He might have been the kid with the beard. It had been a scrawny, reddish beard that looked like he should have been wearing underpants over his face.
“I don’t just mean, the same location. I mean the same place in life, single and starting over. Sort of, a level playing field.”
“There isn’t any playing field.” Lynn shifted in her seat. Around them, people cruised for tables, cut sandwiches into child-sized portions, chatted about normal things. She could write help on a paper napkin, show it to the roving bus boy. Some hideous fascination kept her from getting up and leaving.
Scott pulled something out of his back pocket. “Here. Go ahead, read them.”
A rectangle of folded papers, flattened and curling. Lynn shook her head. “What is it?”
“Poems I wrote you.” He uncreased the paper and smoothed the creases. The typeface was dark blue, furred with age. She read:
MY CRUCIFIXION
She smiles and the nails of lust pierce my hands and feet.
In both her words and her silence, I am forsaken
Here is my bleeding testament, my soul sucked dry
The quick sharp rush of holy sperm
There was more. She pushed it aside. “I can’t handle this.”
“Some of them are in French, but I can’t read them anymore. Look, here’s one of your quizzes. You left it in class and I picked it up and saved it.”
“That’s a little pathetic, don’t you think?”
He shrugged. His slumping posture made one of his shoulders seemed higher, crooked. “I did some other stuff too.”
“What stuff?”
“Oh . . .” He hesitated, then plunged in. “I used to call your place and pretend I was a wrong number, or I was doing a survey. I stole some of your mail once, but I put it back. It was just bills, honest.”
“Go on.”
“I hired a guy to take pictures of you. Remember, he said he was doing a calendar, College Co-eds? On the auditorium steps? You were going to be Miss July? I got a dog, a beagle, because once in class you told somebody you liked beagles. I was going to invite you over to see him, that was my big plan, you’d come over to see the dog and the magic would happen. But the damned dog ate a chicken bone and got an intestinal obstruction and cost me three hundred dollars for emergency surgery. Then he ran away. Oh, I keyed your boyfriend’s car. I really, really didn’t like that guy. I’m so glad you didn’t marry him.”
She felt a kind of vertigo, as if the chair beneath her had disappeared and she was suspended in air. “So you’re saying, you were my stalker?”
“They didn’t call it that back then.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
“That Christmas package you never got from your Aunt June? The sweater? That was a mistake on my part and I apologize. I unwrapped it and couldn’t figure out how to put it back together. But I don’t think you would have liked it anyway, it was kind of ugly. I guess I went a little crazy. It’s nothing I’m proud of. I just wanted you to know how far I’ve come from those days. Like I said, learning from the errors of the past. So that we can have a fresh start.”
He was smiling a happy smile. “Jesus Christ,” Lynn said.
“I’ve done a lot of work on myself since then. I’m a practicing Buddhist now. I’ve had several of my poems published. I’m very hopeful about the applications I have in at a couple of the commuter airlines. It’s true I had a sort of a breakdown after I lost my job, but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it forced me to reexamine a lot of my assumptions. I’ve always led a lonely life. Even when I was married, boy, let’s not get into that story, but I’m convinced she was the reincarnation of some very ancient and evil soul. Anyway, I realized that flying, my love of flying, was a metaphor for my spiritual aspirations, my desire to rise above my lower nature. I’ve freed myself from all the old conflicts, the debased, primitive need to pick sides, compete, assign blame. People should be kind to each other and joyful in their beings. I honestly feel I have a lot to offer you.”
Half of Lynn’s sandwich remained on her plate. She wrapped it carefully in a paper napkin and stood up. “Scott? Thanks for lunch. I think the good news for you here is that after today, I will never forget you.”
A week later Lynn picked up Christine and they drove to the park with the running track. Christine said, “I can’t believe I was such a moron. I can’t believe I let him get away with it.” Tony had called again, and Christine had invited him over for dinner. He’d spent the night, then the next morning told her he didn’t think the two of them had the right chemistry anymore. “Do I have to tell you how much food I cooked? I poached a whole salmon. Asparagus, duchess potatoes, pear cake with chocolate sauce.”
“You forgot the Drano espresso.”
“Prick.”
“At least he didn’t move back in, then tell you the same thing three months later.”
“Once I get some weight off, I decided I’m going to take up pistol shooting. Do trick shots, hit targets from horseback, like Annie Oakley.”
They parked and stood to the side of the track, stretching. Christine wore a pink sweatsuit with dream girl spelled out in sequins across the front of the shirt. “I can’t touch my toes. I can’t even see my stupid toes.”
The trees were leafing out and the track was spattered with cool shade. They took off at an easy jog. Lynn said, “I think it’s possible to get bored with being unhappy. Some kind of natural defense mechanism kicks in, like antibodies.”
“How can you . . . huh . . . talk.”
“Just do a couple laps, then walk, okay?”
Lynn went on ahead. Joyful in our beings! She ran and ran, waiting for her second wind.