our absence from life

I was in Penn Station waiting for the train to take me to New Haven… I was sitting alone, away from the crowd, reading something by John Paul Sartre. “No Exit”, I think.  I couldn’t concentrate on the words; they demanded too much of me.  I couldn’t focus on them.  My mind kept drifting.  I’d just been fired.  I was working in a photographic lab.  I came across some nude photos of a famous entertainer.  I started showing them to my coworkers.  Somebody ratted on me.

A woman appeared.  The first thing I noticed about her was her hair like a wheat field.  And she had a lazy eye.  It kept drifting over toward the bridge of her nose occasionally.  She’d tried glasses and contacts, but nothing helped.  So she resigned herself to the fact that her eye would occasionally drift toward the bridge of her nose. “What’s funny,” she said. “People are usually more concerned about it than I am.”  And that really rang true to me.  I told her to have a seat, but she said she’d been sitting all day.  She worked as a data entry operator for a bank and said it felt good to stand for a change.

“I had too many errors this month… my supervisor took me into his office and said if I didn’t cut down on my errors, he would have to let me go.”

“Funny how supervisors are,” I said.

She smiled and shook her head.  “Bein’ human really hurts sometimes, doesn’t it?”

“It’s only natural,” I said.

“Where are you going?”

“New Haven.”

“What’s in New Haven?”

“My parents.”

“Visiting?”

I waited a few seconds before answering that one because I wasn’t sure why I was returning home… I had a feeling I was going there to hide, but I didn’t wanna tell her that, so I gave her a bullshit answer. “My sister’s getting married.”

“How wonderful,” she said.

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“You guess?” she said.

“It was very sudden.”

“Ohh?”

“She just met him a month ago… he’s a musician… he’s on the road… that’s gonna be their life… not that that’s…”

“I understand,” she said.

I watched her eye wandering like a marble in a glass of milk.  She was attractive if you could get past that slothful eye.  She had a nice natural body.  She had pretty feet; the polish on her toenails was chipping.  But I found that kind of sexy.  I’ve always been attracted to women who are slowly ripping apart at the seams and don’t have the energy to sew themselves back together again.

“Are you married?” she said.

I shook my head.

“Ever been married?”

I shook my head again.

“It’s not for everyone,” she said.  “I thought it was for me… till one day I realized I hated having to compromise like that all the time… with marriage, you constantly have to take the other person’s feelings into consideration… and I’m just too self-indulgent!”  She laughed.  “Plus my husband’s…” She stopped herself, but only for a second.  “Gay…”

“Gay?”

She looked really embarrassed.  I restrained myself from asking her about a dozen and a half more questions. 

“I had my suspicions before we got married,” she said.  “I noticed it would take him a long time to…”  She stopped herself again, looking around, making sure nobody overheard her, and whispered carefully, “Become aroused… I mean, I can usually arouse a guy like that.”  She snapped her fingers proudly but quickly realized what she had just said and covered her mouth with a few fingers.  “Oops! Too much information…I’m usually not this high self-disclosing… it’s just that you’re so quiet, and silence intimidates me…”

“I’m not trying to intimidate you,” I said. “I’m just listening.”

She looked at me for a minute.  “You have patient eyes,” she said.  “Very welcoming eyes.”

“Thank you.”

“My name’s Melba. I’m going to Philadelphia. I think… I have a sister there. We don’t get along at all… I just need to get away for a while… she said I could stay with her for a week… do you mind if I… sit next to you…?” 

She sat down and sighed.  “I have been so stressed lately… between discovering my husband’s gay and my s****y job and my creditors and… I just got a call from one of them the other day… I totally blanked on this one debt I owed for nine thousand dollars… imagine forgetting about nine thousand dollars… but somehow, six years later, their little skip tracers tracked me down… If it had gone another year, it would have dropped off my credit report…oh well,… gotta pay the piper eventually, I suppose… Why do gay men marry straight women? What was he preserving and protecting himself from? He was a barista, for God’s sake!  He made coffee and tea! It’s not like he had a career to protect or anything! Half the people that worked there were gay! ‘Course, my family is so incredibly homophobic. Now, it makes sense, but why would he have even considered marriage?  What was he thinking?  What was the point? And why me?  What was it about me that?  You know what?  I need to stop.  I cannot keep doing this to myself.  It’s over. Oprah would tell me it’s over.  He ran off with some actor who was supposedly some producer’s third or fourth choice for ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’ and I’m sitting in Penn Station about to take a train to my over-achieving, anal-retentive public defender sister whose conservative Christian Republican husband was just elected to the state senate, whose three naturally curly blond children are all enrolled in a Montessori school… and what the hell am I going to do with the rest of my f*****g life?”  She started to cry.  Reaching into her purse, she pulled out one of those handkerchiefs I used to use as a bandana in junior high school and wiped away some of her tears.  “I read someplace there are like four basic questions in life,” she said, taking a corner of the handkerchief and blotting the corner of her left eye… “Who                             

am I?  Do you believe in God?  Do you love me?  And where do we go?”  She shrugged, “I guess after we die…at this point, I don’t know and don’t care…I’m sorry for unloading all my psychic bile on you like this…”

 “It’s okay,” I said…

“Every day’s been high-pitched.  Dramatic.  And I don’t like it.  It’s the truth…”

“I understand…”

We heard a voice over the public address system announcing that the train to Philadelphia was now boarding…

“Oh my goodness, that’s me,” she said, grabbing her bags…she took a deep breath…”I can do this…I can definitely do this…”

“Yes, you can,” I said.

I could tell she was touched. “Thank you for saying that…I’ve had so precious little positive re-enforcement in my life lately…it’s been like nothing but false starts and broken hearts…”

I nodded and smiled.

“It’s really true…” she said, pausing for a second or two.  “…I appreciate it…” She turned and walked toward the platform.

I took a cab to my parent’s house when I arrived in New Haven.

As we pulled into the drive, I stared at the front door.

The cabby turned around to check on me.  “Ya alright, kid?” he said.

I waited.  “…I think I’m gonna check into a motel tonight instead…”

Reviews

[Ern M. Yoshimoto]

I really liked it. full of self-awareness and surprising turns. people don't talk to strangers these days and so there was something almost nostalgic about it too.