East of a City
All I do, I’m afraid, is ride a bus that takes an hour and a half to reach a bluntly skylined, medium-sized city only thirty-one miles away, and then I board a light-rail train that takes forty-five minutes to reach the end of the line, and then I ride the train back, and the bus back, and start all over. The names of the little stations along the light-rail line—Fallowfield and St. Anne’s and Palm Garden and Belasco—are the one elegance left in my life right now. This afternoon, at the back of the car I was riding, a youngish woman in high spirits was loudly and excitedly calling out the wondrous names as the train passed the stations, and she kept making it joyously known that she would be getting off at the Dorchester stop. I wanted to work up the nerve to swivel around and get a good look at her, because what she was doing out loud was of course exactly what I’d been doing all along in my head. Here at last, I assured myself, was someone after my own heart, but I did not turn around and, instead, kept gazing out the window at aging, eternal suburbia, at likely beloved drugstores and bakeries, and at a narrowy laundromat with a midday inner twilight all its own. (Through many faults of my own, I’d been living for decades in an ugly brute of a town, a hard-featured county seat, just beyond the outer ring of the metro area.) The train finally reached the Dorchester station—it’s the second-last stop—and the woman got up and got off with about half a dozen other people, who, I now could see, were all disabled in one way or another and were being led by a quick-tempered middle-aged man. The woman who’d been so excited about the trip and shouting out the names of the stations (she was maybe thirty, with big, boxy black eyeglass frames and chaotic dark hair; she looked a little betranced) was vividly, heartbreakingly, gainfully retarded. I should have wept, but my envy got the better of me.
My late sister’s daughter is now a third of the way through her forties and lives with me for half of the year. She is mum about the other half. She always comes back thinner, tenser, rummaged-looking, heart astagger, huskier of voice, angled differently in what she feels.
I am nothing but a relative with nothing but a one-bedroom apartment, so I ask no questions.
She sleeps on my couch and in my shorty pajamas, and is never ready for bed until she has made certain that there are at least three or four slit-open boxes of baking powder arranged at intervals on the coffee table before her. She talks in her sleep (very rough language), and I imagine there’s a fruitless atrocity to her dreams. (My own dreams almost always get one over on the day behind.) I’ve never been able to make out much of any direction in her; she barely seems to have any bearing left on herself. She has squarish fingernails and wears dressy jeans and a windbreaker and looks a little like somebody scooped out of whatever was left over from somebody else, somebody bigger and self-thwarting and ramified even less. Sometimes when I look over at her, all she seems to be doing is believing in herself.
Through some withholding left-handedness she no doubt got from her mother, she will now and then put some food on the table, but it’s never anything more than just some pickled rice and corkscrew pepper chicken from the refrigerated “Dinner Is Ready!” cases right up front at the Grocery Circus not that far down the street.
I see little of her during the day (she claims to be working at a packing plant one town over, and I am of course usually on the buses and the trains), but come evening I often tag along with her to the urgent-care outlet (she claims her rash is getting even pinker, her swallows are no longer taking most things all the way down), or else we resort to the buffet that used to be a Pizza Hut (the hostess, bless her, always pretends we’re first-timers), and then afterward we walk laps at the dimmest of the ailing local malls, the one with the line of axe-throwing stalls hard by the food court. Her sayings are “Let’s not go to the phones!” and “Watch and wait! People will think we’re together!”
Every few years, a friend drives all the way from St. Louis to spend a couple of days with me. He’s a stocky, unrenovated man in his late fifties, hesitant, something of a wet blanket, and the visits are always pretty much the same. He’s had a number of garish, clamorous marriages, and he likes to stew over them anew in my company at a beer joint with booths whose high-backed wooden benches remind him of the pews in some church where he long ago got confirmed. He is not religious but likes to think studiously about sin. He drinks beer after beer, and I nurse the foursquare local cola.
This friend, even as a teenager, had always had something rancorless and avuncular about him, and he’s no different now, though he insists (I'm not sure I should believe him) that he can get carried away and has put his fist through more than a few walls at home and (more often) at the office.
His first wife (by now I know all of this by heart) lacked drives, beckonings, womanly swoops of any sort. She was dirt-born and had grown up cornered in a big family but no longer had anything to do with any of them. She was always buying vitamins and supplements-–one of almost every variety you could name, even berberine. But she couldn’t swallow pills, so come early afternoon she would toss half a dozen of the things—B12, B complex, magnesium, calcium, D, you name it—into a fluted party cup, run an inch and a half of water over the pills, wander off to the bathroom and back, let herself drift unboosted into bare hours, fix a humble meal of wan, dumpy noodles, do dishes, doze off in the guest room—and forget all about the by now long dissolved pills until morning, when she’d remind herself that water of course goes bad overnight. She’d pour everything down the drain, and come early afternoon, the process would start all over again. This wife had chubby breasts and spongy arms, her color was often off, she was ungenial at the table, she favored a mean, crackly candy that came eight to a box, and she read with only one eye open. The books she read were bulky joke books from the 1940s. The jokes weren’t even jokes, just anecdotes, and most were about show-business folks who quipped offstage about taking another beating at the box office or always having to be the one to lay down the law in bed. My friend gave this mostly rule-abiding woman credit for knowing exactly what next to let go wrong, and she did in fact die pretty crassly.
His second wife, not a cook at all, had come deplored and impeded out of an outdoorsy family out west. She wore figure-hugging outfits and let her body close in on itself. This woman boasted that she could go days without eating a single carb. She prided herself on not needing deodorant and got away with just patting some cornstarch powder onto her underarms, though some days she didn’t take things even that far. Her smell, when my friend could indeed smell it, put him in mind of some garlic-fraught cold cuts he had scorned as a toddler. This wife liked to tip her head back and remember her youth. It was a burdening youth that still thundered away in her heart. There were occasional flashes of frugality in her habits. But something was always hovering just above her feelings and rarely making it all the way down and over to where my friend was watching his shows, or else she would either besmatter him with attentions or think nothing of going to all the trouble in the world to arrive at the supper table in a muggy wigwam of a dress and stop just short of screaming bloody murder. One theme of this marriage, to be sure, was that there might have been something soapy in what he felt for her, something cleansing he kept trying out on her in the long term. The other theme was that people get older.
Of the third wife, my friend would never say much more than that she was the stirringly sullied and self-savoring householden type. There was something only partly unearthed about this woman. You couldn’t be sure you were ever seeing even the clothed entirety of her. He felt himself loved in only cumbersome ways. He had somehow kept expecting exultance.
The one thing that of course united all three of these wives was that he had never once stooped to having sex with any one of them, no matter how elastically or unforgivably you might still want to define sex. He liked to gripe, and I for one could never get my fill of hearing about loved ones driven out.
My mother had only ever told me one thing that still rings true: “You’re going to end up old and alone like me." It’s true that for most of my eighth-grade year, I had to take a bus to and from school. This school was in some low-slung district already long bad off. The bus wasn’t even a school bus, just a city bus. On the ride home, a kid around my age, but even skinnier, would often come aboard when the bus stopped at a templelike private school with a trellised entranceway. This kid would make a point of sitting down next to me whenever the seat hadn’t already been taken. He had a drained face beakily featured, and he usually smelled like powdered sugar. He always said the same thing: “Are your hobbies electronics and photography?” (“Electronics” in those days, mind you, never amounted to anything more than build-your-own crystal-radio kits.) I always said “no” as rudely and as stupidly as I could manage, and that would end any conversation. (I wanted to put the school day and its high-ceilinged hallways and violated civilities out of my mind as far as it could be made to go.) But it’s not as if I hadn’t now and then given hobbyhood a try. At one point I even had a stamp album. It’s just that I never felt as if I were collecting the stamps (I did of course lick a gummed hinge to affix every last one of the stamps to the gray-toned pages of a loose-leaf album); I felt, instead, as if I were doing them a wrong, like pulling wings off a fly. Yet at least twice a week, this same kid would get on the bus and sit down next to me and pose the exact same question. I never once mentioned the stamps, or that other thing I by now had started doing in the worthy dark of my bedroom. I instead just said “no” and then uttered something crude, trying my best to make it abusively original every time. Now of course I know better. I’ve been over and done with for decades. But if someone were to ask if I have a hobby, or what I do with myself all day long, or what I’ve got planned for any holidays, I’d know enough to come right out and say, “Are you asking if you may love me? Is that all you’ve got to drive at?”
Need I be reminded that about a third of the way into the summer (the niece had been gone since right before Easter), a new checkout-line person started working at a forlorn supermarket where I sometimes stop in to pick up a few things? It’s a store I resort to only when I’m feeling a little more glumly myself than usual. This new person in there was young, and for a week or so, I couldn’t be certain of their gender. I would always try to get in their line. Their name tag said “Morgan,” and of course a name like that could go either way. Morgan was tall and angular, with dim gray teeth and a storm cloud of dark, frizzy hair, and was almost always wearing the same round-collared, fadedly prune-purple plaid shirt under the supermarket apron. (The sleeves would be rolled up only a third of the way up the pale forearm, and the wristwatch was chunky and a little loose, gliding to and fro.) I got the sense that Morgan had wound up at the wrong end of the earth but was determined to find a place for herself in it. Ringing up a customer, Morgan would say, “Gosh, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a red onion that big! That thing is colossal!” or “Oh, I see you’ve got a coupon—how wonderful! Let me enter that and see how much of your money I can be saving you today!” It was by overhearing and taking part in these little conversations (“That’s all you’ll be needing today?,” Morgan would say when beholding my box of animal crackers or the bag of trinkety hard candy) that I concluded from the all but trillsome voice that Morgan was a young woman. I kept expecting to make out traces of sarcasm in that gleeful tone of hers, because the break-of-day, good-deed sincerity was a little unsettling, unnatural, so disproportional to the circumstance. Shimmery, plentiful life had been swagged over this lankiness of hers to furtive effect, and I had to remind myself further that some people are of course so secretly but declaratively beautiful that it’s a boon that most people won’t ever even take notice of it at all or else will pityingly mistake it for nothing but gawky homeliness. Yet I felt thrown off track every time I saw her. There was too much of an emotionizing spirality that snared me into its unnerving turnings whenever I was around this freshly natured, balmy being for even a minute. Within a couple of weeks (I had by now been finding reasons to stop by that supermarket almost every evening, buying a can of chow-mein noodles or some blurt of a tomato I knew there was no way I could stomach), I started thinking, “Okay, all right, this Morgan is obviously a college-bound kid. Maybe she just graduated from high school. She’s excited about the life ahead and can barely contain herself.” One evening I was buying two little boxes of microwavable tater tots and a trivial wedge of watermelon. It had already been raining, and the rain was expected to get even heavier, and while Morgan was ringing up my things, the thunder got off to an awfully combative start. She said, in a voice now pushily melodial, “Tell me you’re not going to be out there walking in all this commotion we’ve got going today.” It bothered me that she had thought that way of me. (I always drove to that store.) Maybe she’d figured that because I only ever bought a few things at a time, I must be a poor person without transportation. It was time for me to put my foot down. I said, “Of course not.” Then one evening a week or so later, I was disappointed to find that she had been assigned to oversee the self-checkout lines, which I have always been much too principled to put up with, but I overheard her having a robust argument with another checkout clerk. The argument seemed to be about censorship, and she was speaking with all the smarting conviction of a debate-club underdog. It was right around then that my attendance began to drop off. I saw no point in going if she wouldn’t be the one taking my money, handling my things, handing me my change. At the very end of August, though, I dropped by one evening in a mood for some potato chips, and she was still there, so I figured that maybe the college she was heading off to would be starting its fall term a little later than most other schools. I’d assumed it was some vengefully selective liberal-arts school, either in New England or in some plush suburb of Chicago. All through September, though, whenever I stopped in (it wasn’t very often), there she still was, in her plaid purple shirt and apron. Then I stopped going altogether. I had enough hardly rarefied sorrows of my own, deep-plunging resentments and regrets, renewed daily reminders that I had sacrificed my life for next to nothing, and it had started to depress me too much that she was still stuck at the store instead of visiting professors during their office hours and solemnly sharing her course-related discontents or any newly imagined rents in her sense of self. Then I lost track of her completely. I let her disappear from my pale-souled ways of wondering. But I did stop by the store halfway through December, on the lookout for some nostalgic, star-shaped holiday chocolate, which they had carried in previous years (the candy was never entirely satisfying and had become awfully hard to find, but it always seemed to do me some vague sort of good, even in its chalkier later versions). The store was no longer stocking the chocolate, but there Morgan was again, this time manning the express-checkout line, with her same airs of intelligent but mannered, suspect good cheer. I did not get into her line. Then a month or so later, on a day of squally snow about halfway through the worst of January (I hadn’t felt up to riding the inter-city bus and the train), I was taking a local bus to the closest of the local malls, which is no more than a mile or so from my apartment, and from the window I was surprised to see Morgan trooping along an unpleasant stretch that is neither street nor highway, an intermediate span I had always avoided during my fancy-feeding walks around town, because the traffic gets so truculent. She was wearing nothing but a hoodie, with the hood not even pulled up, and some thin-looking jeans, and I was sure she must have been on her way to the store. She had to have been coming from the only apartment complex at that end of town, a cluster of blocky cement buildings, none rising higher than three stories, that always looked rained on. I’d been forever leery of that complex (after a splashy murder-suicide, it had been rechristened The Dwellings at Somerset), and even through all of my self-initiated removals from apartment to apartment over the inculpating decades of my quivery life, one thing I could at least rejoice about was my never having ended up living out there. I must have all along been assuming that Morgan had a car, or at least a bike, and was staying with at least one adoring, indulging parent. I don’t know what came over me, but I stopped off at the store late one afternoon about a week later, about fifteen minutes before the start of another weather advisory. I’d expected to see Morgan, but there was no sign of her. In the express lane, I was waited on by two very short old women, one apparently training the other. I was buying five or six boxes of the microwavable tater tots. One of the women, the shorter of the two, her head, practically bald and rising only about a foot above the checkout belt, said, “Oh, I just love these things, they’re so good, I buy them all the time, you just put them in the microwave and they’re ready in four minutes!” The total came to $10.28. I already had a twenty-dollar bill out, but I decided to fish for some coins in my pocket. I wanted to get a ten-dollar bill in change. I came up with a quarter and a few pennies. The other old woman said, “Something fell out of your pocket. I seen something fall out.” I looked down at the floor, expecting to see maybe a coin or two. There was nothing on the floor but a tiny rectangle of paper. The woman said, “I definitely seen something fall out.” I stooped and picked up the piece of paper. It was a fortune-cookie fortune. I hadn’t been to a Chinese restaurant in ages, so I knew it wasn’t mine. Nothing like that would have been in my pocket. I didn’t know what to do with the thing. I handed it to the second old woman, who took it and looked at it. I said, “It’s from a fortune cookie.” My items had been bagged, and my change had been tendered. I walked out of the store and instantly regretted that I hadn’t thought to read the fortune. I now expected that it would have had something obliquely but settlingly to do with Morgan. I never did see Morgan again. At the dollar store down the block, I could sometimes count on seeing a grittily pretty, pink-haired assistant manager whose face always looked half open, half shut. It was a whole town full of people like that—ungleamed, self-predatory types with overcopious eyebrows and most of everything of life pressed down too hard into their velvety inner realms. I must have been living in a mirage of marriage to many of them. Then again, sometimes you look at a person and the most you can get is a sense of just how much inside has gone far too long unspewed.
There were people I’d known before I knew I was a woman, and there is one person I know right now who takes me to task for sounding “nonchalant” when I accept an invitation by saying “Sure!” instead of “Yes!” Then one afternoon on the next train back to downtown, and for much of the ride, a man toward the back of the car was talking loudly and foully on his phone, the conversation apparently having much to do with somebody who had just gotten out of prison, and then another man, across from me, starting yattering on his phone, too, and at one point this second man said, to anyone and everyone in the car, “Where do I get off for Fifth and Smithfield?,” and what sounded like a woman's voice from behind said, “Steel Plaza! That's where I'm getting off!” When the train arrived at Steel Plaza, the second man who had been talking on the phone got up, and so did the person with the woman's voice, though it turned out to be a weedy, dirty-blond young man in foolishly velour football apparel. He said, “Back in the day, I used to get off at this stop all the time.” The phone guy said, “Back in the day? You look like you’re barely nineteen. What kind of ‘back in the day’ could you possibly have had?,” and the dirty-blond guy said, “I have a hard time shaving, but today I was shaved. I’m practically thirty now.” I disembarked at Steel Plaza, too, because it’s close to where I catch the bus back, and I saw the dirty-blond guy bounding up a steep flight of steps instead of taking the escalator (which is what the phone guy and I both sensibly did), and there was a bus in about ten minutes, though this was the run with the driver who has no use for me.
Just about everyone I know has been doing little more than just splitting the difference between life and death. I myself have always tended to get lost on my side of an argument. I’ve never been with people in any kind of finally culminating way. I’m not all that complete. When I left my last job, more than one colleague made a point of saying, “You will be missed,” but not one person came right out and said, “I will miss you.” My drawbacks are all out in the open. For one thing, I like being accused; I don’t mind people thinking the worst of me. For another, I’ve always lived a little out of turn but never once felt any sense of ground gained. Over the years, my tinselly affections got snagged on a woman or on some hothoused younger man or another, and I was married, fleetingly, in the unkempt and mindless clarity of my middle fifties. I felt called to this woman. I let myself be pulled in. She was a seething, baggy-eyed, quaintly erotic knockabout sobber with heaps of kinked black hair she never once bothered to tame. We lived moniedly (she had come into an inheritance) in jumbo sublets in the city—not the big one but the sillier one where people on the streets all looked cut down to size. I didn’t mind hearing her go on and on about her past. (When she’d been small, everybody else was even smaller.) Her love for me had little lasting structure in it. In the maiming turn of days we fought and argued, argued and fought, split up, recombined, roused new antipathies in each other, parted without as much as a second thought. Turns out you can love one person only just so much. I’m old now anyway. I’d gotten a lot of things wrong about life, but snitty people who most likely would have once been my foes go out of their way to open doors for me now.
The day before St. Patrick’s, though, another bus driver had it in for me, and two days before that, I’d been waiting for a light-rail train in the deepest of the subway stations downtown, the one where you could almost feel you were in some other, grander, gold-bright city. I’d been admiring an unaccountably gorgeous subway-route map mounted on the wall, when a large, ponytailed man in shorts, a smudged raincoat, and broken-down house slippers (I figured he was in his fifties; I might as well just go ahead and call this man Jerome) approached me and said, “Where you going?” I said the North Side. He said, “Casino?” I said no. I told him there was an appointment I had to get to. He said, “Mercy?” Mercy is a mental hospital. I said no. He said, “Where were you before you were here? New York?” I named some trim little city way at the other end of the state. He said he had once come close to moving there to be paid to learn how to repair jewelry. Then he said, “Ever read in the library?” I said no. He said, “So you just go there and take the books home?” A subway-maintenance man was just then walking past, and Jerome said to him, “They ever bring you drinks?” I couldn’t quite make out the reply—it sounded curse-worded yet flippant. A train arrived, and I got on and took a seat four rows behind where Jerome had sat down on one of the side seats behind the driver. By now I could see how luridly obese Jerome was; while standing, he’d looked just comfortably overweight. At the first stop, a man in a gray uniform came aboard, and Jerome said, “Security guard?” but was ignored. At the next stop, a pale-gray, unshaven man maybe in his middle thirties got on. He was using a walker. He sat down across the aisle from the Jerome, and Jerome said, “Thinking about getting a scooter?” The man with the walker explained that he was recovering from a knee replacement. He said he’d been working at the International House of Pancakes for six years when things stopped going his way. Jerome said, “Ever drive your wife’s car?” There didn’t seem to be a reply. The man with the walker got up and disembarked at the next stop, the one near the stadium. Jerome got off there too. So did I. I watched them walk off together, practically jointed, a dyad now.
Garielle Lutz’s books include Backwardness (Short Flight/Long Drive Books), Worsted (Calamari Archive), and The Complete Gary Lutz (Tyrant Books).