- Home
- Sara Majka
Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories Page 6
Cities I've Never Lived In: Stories Read online
Page 6
The sun set. Light stretched over the harbor. Red lines formed under the clouds. He thought how everything could be the same each day, and how the only change was the light and the kinds of colors it made. On nights like this, drinking used to help, or he would drive to Portland to visit friends, leaving Leigh and her mother together like polite strangers. Now Leigh was in the living room, her eyes like saucers watching the screen, waiting for him to return so the steps of the evening could be gone through.
I don’t want mashed potatoes, she said when he came in. What she wanted was the french fries they used to make in the oven. He switched off the television. Wash your hands, he said.
They’re washed.
Let me smell them, he said. They smelled like skin, like the oils that came from skin. Wash them, he said. He grabbed towels from the kitchen chairs and threw them on the sofa. He made her eat at the table. He didn’t speak while they ate. She found small things to complain about. The crusts that in better moods he cut off. You’re getting spoiled, he said. She watched him. He said, I’m just saying that it’s not something you should be expecting, having someone cut your crusts like you’re the queen of Sheba.
What’s that? she said.
I don’t know, he said, but you’re becoming like that, just like the queen of Sheba.
I’m not like that.
Eat your potatoes then, he said.
They’re yellow.
That’s the margarine.
What’s margarine?
They were ludicrous, the two of them sitting there.
He took out the sweatshirt they had bought at the church; the neck was tight and didn’t go around her head. He ripped it open. There, he said, putting it on her.
That night he read to her. A road that had wound us 20,000 miles stops, with a kind of suddenness, at home. At home and in midsummer. The snow has gone. He read under her lamp. They had brought it from her bedroom. He had asked if she wanted it and she had said yes. Her eyes sank at the sound of his voice. There it was, better. She had eaten some of the potatoes and had hated him. He put the book down, turned the lamp off. He cleaned the table, put the dishes in the sink. He did everything quietly. It wasn’t going to work, he knew. After ten minutes there was nothing to do but what he did the other nights, read in a chair while drinking. She was asleep, had rolled to face the wall. The heater came on in a sigh. He turned off all the lights except the one over the stove, then went out the door. He looked in the window to be sure, but she didn’t move.
Sheila kept him outside while she stayed behind the door. I was just walking by, he said. And I saw your lights.
Where’s Leigh?
She’s asleep.
Is she alone?
What else can I do? I can’t sit there every night.
He tried to get her to come to dinner the next night. She told him that she wanted him to be able to come in and for her to come to dinner, but that it would be lonelier after, and this—how she was now—was as lonely as she could handle. She looked older than usual, and this made her prettier to him.
When he got back Leigh woke up and asked where he had been.
I had to ask Sheila something, he said.
What did you ask her?
Go to sleep, he said.
Are you going out again?
I only had to ask Sheila something.
Where did you go?
I’m not going again, he said.
She lay back down. Several times while he read he looked over expecting her upright but she stayed down. It was so dark outside. Sometimes you can’t imagine it, how beautiful it had been there.
At the end of November they had to drive to Portland. He needed to pick up the work that hadn’t sold at the gallery. They hadn’t asked him to bring new work, so he imagined that was that. In the truck he let Leigh pick any station she wanted, and she kept turning the dial. Okay, he said, there we go. He took over the dial and stopped on a news station. He looked to see if she was pleased or not, and she seemed pleased.
They parked near the harbor and walked through the cobblestone streets. She rose on her toes to balance, and he teased her, because suddenly she looked like an orphan, when she hadn’t looked that way up north.
What did you even pack? he said. Did you pack a dress?
No, she said.
What did you pack?
Jeans.
You pack like I pack. But there’s a difference. Do you know what the difference is?
No, she said.
You’re a five-year-old girl, he said.
How old are you?
I’m thirty-three.
She stopped paying attention. She followed a leaf fluttering down.
He tried a thrift store, but a pretty girl behind the counter told him they only sold adult clothes. He watched her hands as she motioned outside, toward other stores he could drive to.
For lunch they ate Belgian fries in newspaper cones. Leigh studied them, not sure if she was being tricked or not.
You dip them in mayonnaise, he said.
Why?
That’s what they do in other countries. In Canada they eat them with melted cheese.
The sunlight hit the people at the counter, making them look like they were in a tunnel. Everyone still had their coats on. The light would go down soon. After eating they went out into the light. Leigh closed her eyes. The wind blew her hair; she tugged at it with her fingers. The pads of her fingers glistened. His fingers also glistened and he pressed them into the palm of his hand because they felt slightly damp.
Back at the hotel he read to her. I have seen snowflakes all winter like blurred stars in the air … He sat at the edge of the bed until she fell asleep. Then he slid to the floor and tried to read. The heater turned off. It was too quiet. He got the keys from the dresser and went out. He’d seen a bar down the street with a Schlitz sign in the window.
The next morning they picked up his work then found a pair of boys’ boots for her in a thrift store on the way home. As they drove, the highway emptied and the sky widened. Pines on both sides grew taller and thicker. When Leigh fell asleep, he opened the bottle of whiskey, drank. What did it matter? It was straight road for hundreds of miles. He stopped outside Bangor at a discount food store. Near Orono there was a place that sold expired beer. He looked at a pumpkin beer clouded with sediment. The man working there tipped the bottle in the light, said, Should be fine.
They drove 9 toward 193. He had wanted to name her after a small town there called Aurora. The center of town was a gas station with a café, and the town hall, and then two-family apartments with porches. He thought it could be a place to start over. There would be as good as anywhere. He wondered what it would be like, to pull to the side of the road, and enter the café to ask about a place to stay, and the next morning finding a job and building a life without anyone knowing who they were. He didn’t want to bring her back home. He wanted to start again, but it also frightened him, because there would be nothing to keep them from trying again and again, until it became a repetition, each time the surface of them growing dimmer, more transparent, a father and daughter in the entrance of a café. He told her they would be like settlers, like in Oregon with the wagons, and waited for her to ask what that was, but she just looked out the window during the time it took for the town to pass.
When he was married and would take work to the gallery, he used to sleep in the cab of his truck. He preferred it to sleeping at a friend’s place, arriving and standing in the middle of the living room, tall and slim, alien to his surroundings. If they asked, he’d say he was sleeping at a friend’s that they didn’t know. Stepping out of his cab in the morning to the sun low and bright down the tree-lined streets, he’d blink and pound one fist into the other. Then he’d walk to get coffee and rolls at the bakery, walking until he was either warm or at the water. At the water he’d throw bits of bread for the birds. And then often it was to the library or the museum. If it was warm enough to sit in the park, he’d find a sh
aded place to drink and write descriptions of what he saw. He liked to be a little drunk when calling his wife.
It was harder for him to tell what came next. He had decided they would have to move to Portland so that he could find work. He left Leigh with Sheila so that he could go to Portland to look for a place. Walking in the West End, Paul saw a sign in a window and called. He thought they would be renting the rooms that had the sign, and he imagined the tall windows looking onto the street; that they would have a piano, and if the ceilings weren’t tin, they at least would have molding. Instead the woman took him to rooms behind the building. There were collapsed lawn chairs and a plastic pool someone had tried to grow a garden in. Tall trees lined the back. The woman had trouble with the keys. At last she got the door open and drew back a curtain.
You can plant outside if you want, she said.
Does it get sun?
It does, she said, it’s just too late now. She said it held heat well and he couldn’t imagine much of anything getting out anywhere. She said that someone was coming to look at it at three. He remembered his years of living alone in these kinds of apartments and told the woman he would take it.
When he told Sheila that he needed to return to Portland to look for work, Sheila didn’t question him, so he didn’t have to explain. He had put the new key on the ring, but he didn’t tell her this. They smoked on the stoop while the children played. He wondered what he would grow in the summer, if the window would get enough light to be able to grow seedlings. Leigh would grow marigolds, he thought. There was a school at the end of the street and Leigh would start there next year.
He told me he never decided what he would do. The first few days, it was nice being alone in the apartment. The landlady, Lena, had been right about the morning sun. It hit the frost that accumulated on the window and made it glow. He brought in a table from the street. One morning he took his clothes to the trash out back. He trimmed his beard, littering the sink with bits of his hair. He wet a towel and rubbed his armpits and arms and chest, put on a new shirt, brushed down his jeans.
He walked around. Didn’t do much, really. A month passed easily.
One afternoon Lena knocked at the door. He knew it was her. No one else knew there was a door in back. Where the other residents of the building thought he was always coming and going to he didn’t know.
A woman had come and asked if he lived there. I told her no, Lena said, that I didn’t recognize your name, but she left her name anyways.
He looked at the torn paper Lena laid on the table, then went back to the stove. They didn’t say more about it.
He didn’t call Sheila. Instead he went to the harbor and found a job washing dishes in a restaurant. Four days a week for the dinner shift. At five he ate with the kitchen staff. He wasn’t sure how he spent the rest of his time or how time had passed so quickly. He grew his beard again; he gave up the flattery of slim-fitting shirts. When he had trouble painting, he got glasses. He looked in the mirror and saw he had been changed by what had happened. After it rained, he’d walk out in bare feet, feeling the thawing ground underneath him. He took to novels, still liking the ones he found in boxes, slender books with dried pages. He bought food at the co-op in the center of town, small bags of cashews, bags of dried fruit and fig bars, and would eat them downtown, sitting on benches or curbs.
At work they told him a woman had come in and asked for him. He understood then that he was simply waiting. When Sheila found him working in his garden, he went inside for drinks. They sat in camping chairs near a tree where the moss was so soft she slid off her shoes. She took out a half-smoked cigarette she then had trouble lighting.
They went to a show downtown. She wore one of his cardigans. They sat in the back corner, against a record bin, both of them pulling their legs close. Her breath smelled like the alcohol they were sharing, and what she had eaten, and also a little of flowers, though it might have been her hair. Do you like the show? he asked between sets.
This is what you do? she said. This, and your garden?
And I wash dishes, he said, most nights. I just have tonight off.
You left a lot to be able to do this, she said.
I try not to think of it that way, he said.
How do you try to think of it?
I couldn’t really say, he said.
She walked home with her hands in the pockets of his sweater in a way that he liked. He thought about kissing her, thought that her breasts would be small. In the apartment he turned on the lamp, took out his bedroll. She stood in the kitchen. You’ve been here the whole time? she said.
Except the few nights I slept in my truck, he said, but then I found this, and she let me stay even before the first of the month.
Is that the woman I met that one time?
Yes. Lena.
He asked her if she needed anything else, anything to sleep in, but she said she was fine. He went to the bed he had made in the kitchen.
In the morning she was up before him, sitting in the garden with a book from the nightstand. She read out loud from one of the poems. When she finished he said, I don’t have to tell you what it was like for me, what it’s been like, do I?
She said, I had to find your wife. I had to tell her that you had left, and she came and took your daughter while I stood there.
There’s nothing I can say, he said. I’ve tried to think of something all this time.
Later in the day, a man started to work on the foundation where the house was sagging. When Paul looked out the window, he could see Sheila talking to the man. He wondered what they were talking about, and he remembered that about her. They had once gone to the grocery store together, and she had started talking to the woman looking at the produce, and with the fish guy and the checkout bagger, ordinary conversations about the weather, or what the catch was like, or which fruit was in season.
She came inside. I’m going for a walk, she said.
He said, I’ll probably read and then go to work. Do you think you’ll be back before?
She wasn’t sure, and walked around for some time. She went to the thrift store and tried on skirts and boots. She went to the deli and sat there. When she walked back the sun had lowered and no longer hit the garden; the man had stopped working on the foundation. She thought of the line of mail-boxes and the woman who told her that she didn’t know Paul. Well, we should all find some way to be protected, she thought. We should all find ways to protect ourselves. She unlocked the door with the key Paul had hidden. He had left the lamp on, with a note that there was food in the fridge. She found a plate with chicken. She put it on low, then took her clothes off to shower.
It was a slow movement they made over those weeks, Sheila sitting with her skirt sliding up her legs, Paul drawing while she smoked. If she stayed for a long time she would go through volumes of poetry and not remember the authors’ names but would remember the sense of spaciousness it gave her. It reminded me of a time before I met my husband, when I lived in San Francisco, in an apartment with rooms full of people I barely knew. We used the kitchen to arrange food, cut bread if we had any, putting the knife in a sink overflowing with dishes and going down the hall where the rooms branched off.
The light in my room came in strong and spare. I had tried to grow herbs on the sill. The wood floor was as dusty as the hallway but faded by sunlight. I slept on a mattress on the floor and there were boxes and piles of things everywhere, including beautiful clothes that belonged to a friend who was traveling. Some of the books and records were hers, too, though others I had found that summer, going through used-book stores and thrift stores. I read with my head on the mattress and took breaks to smoke out the window, full of what I had read. What had I read back then, what had made me feel that way? I had a volume of Rilke and Saint Augustine and early Hemingway stories. I must have left them in the room when I moved away.
THE MUSEUM ASSISTANT
For a time, I worked at a small museum on the Upper East Side. It was a museum most p
eople had never heard of, located at a college most people had never heard of. The museum was in a low concrete building. You could easily miss the entrance when walking by. There was a rail, a door, and the name in silver letters. Inside, the windows were above your head. The doors opened to a foyer, where I sat behind the desk and gave out stickers and offered to put people’s coats in the closet behind me. In the galleries were mummies, pottery, and miscellaneous art. At noon my boss took over while I ate in the park across the street. I watered the plant in the corner and ran weekly admission reports, but mostly I sat there, feeling vacant, and it was during one of these shifts that a man came in who reminded me of my father.
He was older but attractive, and he appeared successful, though it’s unlikely that my father would have aged into any of these things, but it had seemed possible to me then, sitting in the foyer, which was off-white and taupe and underground. The man draped a sweater over his shoulders and moved through the museum absently while guards sat on high black chairs. Soon the man would be gone and it would be me again, as though in a tasteful underwater tomb. When the man paused between galleries, I asked him what he thought of the collection, though it wasn’t my habit to speak to people I didn’t know.
He said that he had once worked for the museum, and had been in charge of raising funds for its construction, though he hadn’t ended up liking it, and he took some responsibility for that. He no longer reminded me of my father, but I was struck by this, that a man who reminded me of my father had turned out to be the man who’d created the building where I had sat for so many hours. When I went into the bathroom, I found myself wishing I had asked his name, and I felt the loss of him, that we might never see each other again.
I saw him a week later. On my way home I had wandered off track and gotten lost. I did this often—I would leave the subway and walk in the direction opposite to where I was supposed to go. Sometimes I imagined a person watching me from up high—starting off in one direction before taking another, my misdirection gradually turning to panic—and imagined how different I must look from the other people on the street.