From early on, I’d had to be taught to never be heard from again, but at some point in my forties I began noticing these three who rode buses all day long, just as much as I did, and their ridership looked even more devotional, more engrossing, than mine. The towns the buses passed through must have begun bunching up in their minds as a single, solitary place that any lore had long ago run off from, a place to turn their backs on, until the driver ordered them off. I always thought the driver meant me too, but he always made a point of saying, “Not you, lady,” and then I would say that it was my stop anyway, and he would try to trap me in conversation. By the time I’d worked myself free from him, the girls were always already gone. Was it so very wrong, though, for me to wonder where they went?
They looked to be in their twenties, and they looked to be uncheerable, and a different sort of person would probably not have been so quick to dismiss them, the way I sometimes did, as women whose sorrows must have already been scaled back to an eliminative balefulness expressed mostly through their diet: I pictured Table Water crackers left to go stale before sunup on an otherwise bare table in an apartment bare of any giveaway pawings from a bed.
And those buses: they were forever bruising their way beyond some verge or another, and the terrain out there was mostly blunt, relieved here or there only by an offscape of warehouses or a lake about to be drained. Our state was one that showed up almost perfectly rectilinear on the map, but the borders were in fact hackly, jagged. Departers often felt torn up inside once they got out.
Except for the occasional older person, the only other ones ever on these buses were men in whose faces I could make out the unluminary trance of workers done for the day with their work. I’d listen to them talking unwondrously. But these girls, these miserably tressed cusses who always sat as close together as three people can get on a bus: there was a cosmeticized falsery to their faces that you couldn’t quite take the full measure of without resorting to a stare. “If they’re even women,” you couldn’t help sometimes doubting, because you were through with most things too. It was expected of you to have a weakness for people even weaker than yourself. A going explanation, should one be needed, was that nights were a hardener of whatever had most gone loose in a day, and my days, to be cruel, were trash. Things always felt a little too early to already be too late. I was in my stunted forties, as I say, and I went about perspirantly in snugging unfinery of an unvarying hyacinth violet. These were dresses that cropped me into somebody a little thinner, a whole lot less burgeoning.
I now and then wondered if they were sisters, these girls. They had no features in common, but people in those days spoke of “blended” families. Then again, these girls just looked mixed, tossed together, unstirred to any uniform consistency.
Then one day they had seated themselves as far apart from each other as possible. The driver’s usual howl for them to get off startled me, and as they worked their way to the front, I got up too. I got close enough to one of them that my fingers trended trickily toward hers. She caught mine first. We stepped off, and she led us away from the other two, saving face, I guess, by talking speedily about a houseplant of hers practically at death’s door. Then, that quick, she said, “We could never be friends,” and I didn’t think to ask whether she meant her and me or her and those other two.
We were in some town, close to what seemed to be the center of it. (A few puny stores, a butcher’s stall.) She led me down the street and into a building, an apartment house, up two flights of stairs, and down a corridor, past a line of doors, and she then tried a knob, found it unlocked, and went in. I followed.
“He’s probably not due back for a while yet,” she said. She was quick to shut the door, throw the latch, the bolt.
The apartment was just that one room, windowed on only one wall, and the window got the better of the town. There was a couch, and we were already sitting at opposite ends of it.
She felt it only fair to say something up front about her brother, though he was only a stepbrother and was still in school, scarcely untucked from childhood, purposeless in his growing. Everything she said started with, “I’m to tell you.” Then she got on the subject of herself. When she was a kid, the doctors had been thinking along lazy-eye-syndrome lines and patched up her good leg so she no longer could put any weight on it. She crawled back and forth to school, dragging her good leg. She’d always been built differently, and for a long time it was still too early to live and learn. Her parents hadn’t believed in parting the curtains or, behind the curtains, raising the blinds. Her one real, unstepped brother was acceptably destructible, or at least excusably so. He had a brutal sense of up and down, and she rarely crossed paths with him anymore except when he was showering people with gifts. Until lately, she’d been banging around in the lower mathematics, then dropped out, found a bunkmate’s narcotica in a tube sock, had no luck with any of the capsules, moved out, bought work shoes to wear to work, lost one job after another, went back to school but the education wasn’t telling her anything and she was merely attracting attention, the professoriat sweated onto her clothes, her parents were off once again taking their ease in a rehab—it got to where she couldn’t even go to a grocery store and pick up three or four things for a simple little dinner without the checkout clerk looking at everything she’d laid down on the belt and jumping to conclusions, construing it all as somehow recapping her life. Her last job had lasted exactly three and a half hours at someplace restaurantial where the owner, or the shift manager, whoever he was, kept staring at her until she felt as if her features had gone runny and were about to bleed away. And as for the two girls she rode the buses with (I could see her wanting to reach a conclusion), she had long since been of the opinion that however much you might come out of people with, it is always less than whatever you had brought along with you inside.
This all sounded to me like ground covered long ago, though.
“What about lately?” I must have said because she right away said, “Trying not to put out an eye.” She pointed to lots of solitary nails driven into the walls at what looked to me to be exactly her eye level. (I gathered that there must have once been lots of things to hang.) She said she’d tried twisting the nails out with her fingers, prying them loose with pliers. When that hadn’t worked, she’d resorted to impaling pieces of paper onto the nails or hanging clothes hangers on them as grave reminders to watch out, but somebody kept tearing down the paper and putting clothes on the hangers and then putting the clothes away in the closet.
“The guy whose place this is?” I said.
“He’d never do anything like that.”
“Who else comes in here?”
“Things can get kind of communal at times.”
“Those two girls?”
“Let me show you the closet.”
But she made no move to get up.
She talked about the man. She made him sound creased and faraway because of his height. In the description, late-day hair was appreciating on his cheeks and chin and on the curve above his mouth. He otherwise came across as a man who always wore gloves when he drove, which, I gathered, wasn’t very often.
“If he comes, we’ll have to leave,” she said. “He always knocks first, though.”
She reached for a little wooden case under the sofa and brought it out, opened it, set it on my lap. It was full of freehand, haywire jewelry—bracelets and other devisings of obviously her own lurid and private manufacture. I’d be expected to try some of these on? I saw that I’d already folded my hands, and I kept them folded.
By now I guess I’d had her sized up as a lean-minded and narrow-hearted lover of malarkey, but I made a pledge to myself that I’d give things another quarter hour.
“Shall we exchange names?” she said.
I said I’d been named Laney after a vivid and sometimes awfully sweaty aunt, but right away that made me wonder, for once, who or what I might have really been underneath that name or, worse, without it. Now that I thought about it, it did sometimes seem as if nothing but the name alone had been propping me up all along.
The girl said she’d lately taken to calling herself Patrice but wasn’t averse to responding to Carly.
“Now that we know each other,” she said and reached for my hand in a companionate way. We sat quietly holding on to each other for a bit. It wasn’t so ridiculous. “Come closer, Laney, my Laney,” she said. “You’re not tired of me, are you? You don’t think I’m too tied to my belongings?”
Then the man himself knocked, and in he walked in all of his heights. He took one look at me and turned to her and, talking too fast for me to follow, gave her what I took to be a summing-up dressing-down of a peppily violent kind.
She shoved some of the jewelry onto an arm and said, “I guess I’ll be going out with him for a little while. For just a bit, okay? Please make yourself at home. Stay as long as you like. Let me give you some money?”
The man didn’t even glance in my direction on their way out. The girl first gave me a quiet little kiss. It was a kiss of the plenishing kind, not the kind that draws something cloudy and possibly important out of you and leaves you feeling dry and unvital.
After they left I sat for a while on the sofa and must have fallen asleep. I got up a few times in the middle of the night and turned on a light to see if I was alone. A sheet had been draped over me, but there was no sign of either of them. I went back to a sound sleep.
I spent most of the next morning in her closet, horning myself into her wardrobe, nudging myself into her every getup (she had some very nice things, if they were hers), then let myself out.
At the time of which I now write, I lived in an apartment, and days when I wasn’t riding the buses, I was driving a car, but only locally, to a drive-thru, one of those handy microphone-and-speaker setups, because that way you never had to look people in the face when you let on what it was you really wanted.
The building where I lived was a block long, with turrets, cupolas—the builder hadn’t missed a trick. It had a lobby with three couches arranged to form a U of sorts. Nobody ever sat there unless they were waiting for a cab, and there were only five cabs still on the move in this town. The day the building manager was scheduled to escort the appraisers through every unit, my idea was to pretend not to be at home. I spent six straight days, starting from the day the notices were taped to our doors, throwing everything that was on the floor into boxes and crates, then piling the boxes and crates high against the walls, vacuuming the cleared centers of the rooms. When appraisal day came, I hid, unimaginatively, in the bedroom closet, behind trash bags stuffed with sweater dresses. I’d expected to hear no fewer than five or six sets of footsteps but could make out only two. To my surprise, the closet door was never flung open. Nobody said, “How old did you say she is by now?” All a voice said was, “Looks like somebody’s all set to move.”
I had lived in that building for an awfully tawdry decade. My sleep, when it came, was mostly monotonous. I’d often overhear tenants saying of me, “I must’ve run into her ten times on the stairs today.” The landlord kept raising the rent and promising to knock out a wall or two to give us a better chance at some view. I often went for a walk. The town’s observatorium wasn’t popular anymore. There weren’t enough people around for me to play favorites. I felt useless in the sceneries outside—shopping centers off to the side, or parks where somebody or other did in fact now and then park, then sit with windows rolled up. I’d make my way back to the apartment house, loom behind other tenants at the line of mailboxes right after the mailman had left. The older ones were always the first to abstract their bent, little mailbox keys from robe pockets and change purses, but they’d say, “No, you go ahead, because you’re on your way to work. We’ve got all day.” There would be nothing in my box, of course, and I would have to be seen fluttering my hands to make the lack of letters, circulars, parcels, seem a relieving inconsequence. No matter how loosely or foolishly I was dressed, I would have to charge out the front door again afterward, pulling nobody visible behind. That was primarily why I came to walk so much and why people came to say, “Yes, I know you—I mean I recognize you, I’ve seen you everywhere, we all have—do you deliver messages?” Then the world would have to quickly reduce itself all over again into streets, alleys, gutters, candy-bar receipts in the gutters. The town still had a morning paper and a late-afternoon paper, but by nightfall you were on your own.
My life harks back and forth to the time, not all that much later, when I suddenly had a husband, a raw-headed, speculating fellow, someone straight from a fair game but profitless infidelity to some other sexually petty brunette (to cite one of too many already), somebody good at pointing people away from himself, someone who nevertheless could never pass up a hitchhiker, someone whose mind you could sometimes actually hear clearing itself up, somebody who wanted me to wear themed hosiery and fix him sandwiches of parsleyed bologna, somebody who didn’t try to get me to come out of my shell (since, as he said, it was the shell itself that people seemed to prefer); but it wasn’t until not even all that much later that I was given to understand that there was the man you loved and there was the man you married, then the man you liked after you were married, then the man who took off with your married man.
After the divorce (the last time I spoke to him was on one of those old phones, my words draining away through the sieve of the talk cup), I took note of what people were doing now with their lives, liking what it would have been like to be out of the picture entirely, and I tried doing a little of that. It was always a labor of wrongs from the start, though—even those months when I lived with a younger woman who was unemployed all the while I knew her but dressed night and day in a uniform that was pleaty and acorn-colored. She claimed she could get along with anybody but haggled over any affection I asked for. (Her body would never turn out to be a worthy diversion from mine.) She had a couple of little kids who, come morning, would ask, “May we wake up now?” These two, these girls who sipped lemoned water from bowls and lived mostly on cold cuts, were polishedly despondent already, their hearts already scrambled. They were unsure of their places on the murky furniture. Their smiles were always turning a corner. They would each manage to get me alone, then say, “You’re just trying to get me to say something bad about her.” (It’s true: women have children just to clear themselves out. Childbirth is a process of elimination.) The mother found it easy enough to put words in their mouths. The woman and I braved the evenings with talk radio and pursued lives that could have used some doing. The few times we had company, the visitors (confusional cousinry of hers, usually) would add smells to the smells already collecting and would point to things in the living room—any old bald-faced clock or a whatnot to which hairpins had somehow gotten themselves stuck, even a library book gladdened up with Mylar—and expect there to be a story about each, as if each had all along been sheltering some threatened history. Afterward, full of homebody behavior anew, the woman would look at me with a sparkle I found defiant. We would coach each other forward into bed, where she always thought she ought to owe herself something first. Looking back, I guess I should have done something about either one of us. Life kept heaving itself away from me, and I threw myself aside as well.
All right, then, I’d tell myself: go ahead, get them all covered up in recall. The two you married. Then the one you told that it’s better to eat out alone because that was the only way you could give the food its rightful due. Then that woman always looped around one man or another except at the laundromat, where she kept to herself. And the one who pioneered a new kind of mood in which she had to stand up to her body and bring it the bad luck it must have been begging for all along—wasn’t she also the one always saying that it’s not exactly news that women had cocks but that the clitoris, considered as a cock in miniature, was less of a joke? There was always something inconclusive about the way she was dressed. And then the one who said she felt as if she had two left hands and claimed to get preferential treatment in her dreams.
I lived with just one other woman after those. She was a woman on whom loneliness must have missed its mark. She had bambooish arms and a history of nuptial hardship. There wasn’t a single one of her marriages she could recount that didn’t involve more than two personnel. (The third wheel was usually some party who talked about her day at work—in a cashier’s cage, often as not—as if it were another life she had to report to.) “People will be people,” this last one of mine once said, then quickly corrected herself. I remember tenemental bookcases and an ailing refrigerator that sumphed and exhaled. The color must have long ago gone out of the walls. She was always a latecomer to sleep but would awaken from even the merest of naps with an aftershine that had to be wiped away. We sometimes got along in the way of friends suddenly made and then just as suddenly lost, or we took turns not being the one being mothered, but mostly there was a book she kept reading, though even a single sentence on a subject that didn’t concern her in the least could nonetheless make her feel berated to the point that she wanted to punish it back. She loved me by rights a little abusively, and I’d fall behind in myself—I’d have to start all over again.
A couple of her sisters were of course still alive close by, spinstered but still practiced in being with people, but their viewpoints seemed squandered on her. Truth to tell, I was practically sixty by now myself, still seeking any final outlets for my youth. Yet when you touch someone—if you’re going to take things that far—where after all must the hand really go?
Of the time of which I might as well come right out now and speak—my life!—a few people who are to be known here only as her unfit children, daughterly boys grown and now gone, fending off the hours in untowering towns of their own: I later knew one of them only well enough to say, “May I lie to you?”
I told him part of everything—your part in it anyway.