Space

Photograph by Seth Townsend (not posed)

She knew how to listen. She had to. She worked at Walmart, in the Optical Department, fitting people with nice new frames at reasonable prices. If her ears weren’t open to the customer’s needs – that’s how her manager explained it – her customers might complain and consequently she might return to cash-register duty quicker than she could say two-for-the-price-of-one margaritas at Don Pablo’s. Her manager was in his forties, on the lean side of chubby, on the friendly side of angry, on the divorced side of married. He had been a Walmart Associate since Walmart came to town, sixteen years ago, and he understood what it took to succeed with the company. Commitment. Understanding. Joy. She liked her manager. Her boyfriend insisted the manager was full of shit. Her boyfriend said a profound difference existed between knowing how to listen to people in a simple employment setting and how to listen to people in the context of a complicated, socially stratified environment beyond the world of white-trash retail. Her boyfriend was smart. He taught World Literature at the Community College and encouraged his students to dig deeper, to translate the nearly impenetrable language of the universe into something they could use at their jobs, with their families, with their friends. His life, he said, made other people’s lives better.

She worked most weekends because that’s when the bulk of the Optical Department’s traffic would come in. Her boyfriend worked most weeknights because that’s when the best students from town were able to attend the courses he taught. When she was off work, during the week, she liked putting on something nice and going out for drinks and dinner with her girlfriends and chatting about this and that. When her boyfriend was off work, in the daytime and on weekends, he liked staying home and reading novels by foreign writers and having long telephone conversations with people he knew in graduate school, miles away, lifetimes away, he said, back when life had purpose beyond mere self-sustenance. Occasionally, in their apartment, she would watch him running his hands through his hair and sighing into the telephone. He would say, This town is just so mentally dead. She had been born and raised here. She had always been happy here.

One Monday afternoon, she was off work and her boyfriend didn’t have any classes to teach and she asked him, point blank, why he loved her. He thought about this for a while, seemed like a few minutes, and finally he said, Space. She was supposed to guess what that meant. She took her keys and went for an afternoon drive instead. Everything looked about the same as it always had, maybe a few more chain stores, maybe the trees had gotten bigger.

When she become bored with driving, with reassessing, she called her manager and asked if he felt like meeting her for happy hour at Don Pablo’s. Don Pablo’s used to be a Country Kitchen and before that it was an A & W Root Beer stand and before that it was a pizza place named Riggli-something-or-other but that was a long time ago. She remembered that the guy who owned the pizza place died and a lot of people in town were sad.

Her manager had a blue Chevy S10, clean, shiny in the late-afternoon sun. He backed into a spot and stepped on the parking-lot asphalt and hiked up his pants and made his way toward her car like an animal might to a block of feed. No matter how much exercise he might do, for the rest of his life, he would always have a double chin. He would always be a Walmart Associate. He had gone as far as he was going to go. So had she. She opened her door and looked up into his eyes, a milky gray, and smiled a smile that wasn’t true, that wasn’t human need, that wasn’t love, that wasn’t why life is worth living through, not yet, not this afternoon, not in this town, but it was the only smile she had left.

Thanks A Lot

Photograph by Seth Townsend (not posed)

She blamed her father. He used to tell her happiness was the ability to ignore the score. You’re behind your whole life, he would say, but in the end you’ll win. He lost. He died early. Heart attack. Playing softball. She was in high school, sixteen years old, and somehow took the long view of this. She kept smiling. She moved forward. She worked two years checking at Target then two years waitressing at Ruby Tuesday’s then went to a Super Bowl party at Buffalo Wild Wings and met a guy fresh out of law school. He was into golf and sports on TV and liked pina coladas, he said, and winked, but couldn’t give a shit about walks in the rain. He smiled a lot too. He was a nice guy. She married him a year later, on Super Bowl Sunday, because that felt right, because the championship game meant so much to him.

One summer Sunday night, she was forty years old and her husband was forty-four and their son was sixteen and upstairs in his room. She was either downstairs in the kitchen putting things away or bringing things outside to the patio where her guests were relaxing with drinks and snacks. It was a lot of work but she was happy to do it. She liked having company. So did her husband. She stepped behind the garage to sneak a cigarette and saw her husband leaning against the wall with his blue, St. John’s Bay golf slacks at his ankles and with his golf buddy’s wife squatting in front of him and taking a careful look at his personality. Her husband ran his hands through the woman’s hair and closed his eyes as if he were discovering, after a lifetime search, the last unknown quantity in the universe.

On the patio, her guests in their department store clothing matched the patio furniture she bought a month ago at Home Depot. One guest, the man whose wife was behind the garage, chuckled absently and drained the rest of his Bud-light and crumpled the can and looked around not for his wife, not for anything human. She looked in the upstairs window, into her son’s room, and saw him shirtless, standing in a purple, fluctuating light. He was moving. She could not see his hands. She had a long way yet to go. She hoped she had endurance enough to get there. She smiled at her guest and asked if he would like another beer. He did. He handed her the empty can and an empty plastic plate and a plastic fork and a crumpled paper napkin and she took these things inside.

Her Enthusiasms

Photograph by Seth Townsend (not posed)

She drove everybody crazy. She couldn’t help it because, as if it were an affliction, she was naturally overcome with enthusiasm. She would tell people – she would apologize to people – that she had a big motor and what can a girl do with big motor but run it wide open? Why turn it off when there is so much to do in one lifetime? Sometimes, when she dealt with her children or her relatives or her friends, when she’d explain a new idea she had in the works, she would see the way they looked into her eyes, a hesitance, a nodding rejection, a patronizing lift of the brow, and she would know the truth: no matter how many parties and dress-up days and trips out of town she organized, no matter what she did to alleviate boredom in the world, she would always be the woman with the blazing letter C on her chest. Crazy.

A while back, her older sister called and asked why since the beginning, since the womb, since birth, did everything have to be a such a major production? Why not mellow out and be like everybody else? This was an unanswerable question much in the same way that life itself was an unanswerable predicament. She was either getting herself ready for the next event or cleaning up from the previous event and this would go on, without pause, till she could not go on any longer.

Friday evening, she locked herself in the bathroom, ostensibly to shave her legs, to beautify before going out with friends. She drew a hot bath, lit candles, relaxed, and drifted off to an enthusiastic, dreamy oblivion.

The next morning, she woke in the tub, in the cold water. Her legs were not as wrinkled as she thought they might be. She rose, she put on a robe, she opened the door and could hear her children in the living room watching TV, and she walked toward the sound. The kids were watching an infomercial about a miracle cream that would send acne all the way back to the stone age from whence it came. With this cream, the announcer said, you would never be unhappy again.

One of the kids asked where she’d been all night. She looked at the TV, at the kid, at her pointless life, and she said she couldn’t remember.

Happy Times

Photograph by Seth Townsend (not posed)

She was used. She knew this was true. Her boyfriend told her all his girlfriends were used, even the new ones. Somebody had taken them for a test drive. She could have taken herself for a test drive, for all he knew. He worked at the mall, at the Old Navy. She worked at Fuddruckers Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. The other days, she didn’t know what she did. She partied. She danced. She did lines off of toilet tops. She slept late and in the afternoon texted her boyfriend to come home and when he did she was like okay, let’s go out. Sometimes, late at night, in the parking lot outside the bar, she paced and smoked cigarettes and tried calling her father. He never answered.

Last Wednesday at work, when the shift was almost over, she told one of the gay waiters she had a lot of problems. He was like you? Perfect you? Name me one problem you have that’s not completely in your head. She couldn’t. She went out with everybody after work and smiled for all the Facebook pictures. Guys surrounded her like bluebottle flies over a picnic on a hot day in the city park. They were so funny. They bought her Cosmopolitans and Jagerbombs and touched her shoulder, lightly, when they leaned to her ear to tell her she was an exceptionally cool girl, a girl definitely worth getting to know. One of the bus boys had coke, really good coke, the kind not cut with baby laxative, the kind as clean and pure as the shit the Incas used to set out, he said, on important ceremonial occasions.

At dawn, she watched the bus boy’s chest rising and falling like an empire and she checked her cell phone and saw her boyfriend had left thirty-seven messages. She didn’t need to check them. He was right about her, had been since the beginning.

She wandered outside, in her underwear, into the bus boy’s raggedy back yard, and regarded the disease of daylight spreading over the dew. She sat on the wet grass and eased her bare back into the cold blades and stared through the trees at the sky. The sun would appear there eventually. Maybe she would be happy then.

After the Header

Photograph by Seth Townsend (not posed)

She didn't love her mother enough. She didn't love her boyfriend enough. She hated her job, and then she lost it. She drank. She bitched. She ate shit. She didn't give a shit. She fucked off. She fucked too much. She didn't fuck enough. She considered her life to be an elaborate form of et cetera. Once, when she was eighteen, she accepted two hundred dollars from a lawyer to dance at a party he was throwing at his office. Fat men slapped her ass. They had a great time. She spent the two hundred dollars on clothes at Target. She looked nice on her first day of class at the community college.

A couple of weeks ago, she started looking people in the eye, really looking. She could see a black, empty spot in the middle of everybody. With an actual person, this black spot was one thing, fleeting, as if in the split second a person's eyes were leveled into hers she had final proof that the light of the mind is a lie, then the eyes would look away, and she wouldn't be certain what she had seen was true. In a photograph of a person, this black spot was too much to bear. The eyes never wavered from hers. She would go on her computer and look at pictures of her friends, her mother, her boyfriend, herself, and would zoom in on their pupils. No matter how she adjusted the resolution, the eyes were the same. They had nothing behind them. They would never see who she was, deep down. Nobody knew her. She didn't know herself.

Before she jumped, she stared at the sun and tried to blind herself with the light of world. She failed at this. On the way down, she saw sunspots in the concrete and wondered, at the last instant, if she had misinterpreted the signs.