Prostrate on the carpeted floor of a rented room because heat rises, Lee thought maybe I will suck an icy lemonade from a straw and go thumb through dresses at the store. It was Sunday and the last day of that particular August. On the desk was an unopened envelope: standard sized, made out in a cautious script to Lee Wachtel, 12 Beverly Circle.
The day was hot and felt impossible. Several errands were started and stopped before being given an honest try. Tasks were contemplated, abandoned and then circled back to again like food pushed around on the plate of an obstinate child. Any honest proctor would have found that attempted work in that sort of heat was nothing more than pretense: a kind of posturing towards busyness that, when examined closely, dissolved into nothing more than a frenetic trick—the crown of one’s hair mussed in the mirror between the revving and cutting of an engine, a cold stream of water diving headlong into a glass.
In that heat—the kind that turns everything old—Lee could find herself snug in a tricky parking spot (one of those that is tight on all sides or arrived at from a jaunty angle), having deftly maneuvered the job without any recollection of a struggle afterwards. On a day like that, blinking into consciousness just outside the drugstore or catty-corner from the hardware depot, behind the bottle redemption site or across from the ice distribution center, Lee might suddenly think better of it, peel off down the road so as not to have to leave the womb-like sanctum of her car.
Like a racer crouched behind the starting line of the day who has heard the air-gun fire of GO but has decided not to GO, and rather to STAY, Lee felt low to the ground in those days. She would imagine all the other racers pooling over and passing her, kicking up dust, the mound of her body just a kink, like that kind of snaggled rock which is the engine of a frothing rapid. Time might pass like this for a day; time might pass like this for a season, and when it did, Lee felt afforded the freedom to let herself genuinely wonder—in the face of some startling or banal task—what kind of thing could ever be worth doing?
Outside, Lee’s neck trickled rivulets. Hair dampened and stuck to her skin. The concentrated heat of the car interior against her thighs felt like a memory. It felt like watching her brother fry ants with his magnifying glass on the driveway in the dry wind of childhood, killing the marching, leggy things for no good reason other than nothing better to do, which she had suspected back then might be the most animating feeling of all. Lee could feel again how her eyes had pricked hot on that day, how her tears had given off a specific heat that, once compounded with the more nebulous heat of day, seemed to almost cancel itself and leave behind an otherworldly coolness in its place.
One’s own body could feel nearly automatic at certain junctures of inaction, a rogue hand sliding a gearshift into reverse just seconds after having parked, circling the block once more for some kind of answer—and the car becomes a kind of divining rod then. How quickly could that gearshift cut the day in half? Quarter it? Undam the pool of Lee’s possible lives like some infinite and benevolent flood?
It could feel wrong in those moments—what a waste of gas—or startling, still, to be honked at when a parking spot was in demand, but really all that starting and stopping and starting again felt altogether right, pointed towards a truth floating just below the boiled over surface of the day: there is such a thing as right-wrongness, a Freudian slip of the heart.
At a fork in the road, Lee imagined the different fabrics that might hang in the store’s window display. Polka-dot muslin, or shiny teal satin with a prissy bow on the rump, something crocheted tightly enough to obscure a lady’s nipples but variegated with enough holes to imply the color and shape of her underwear. She imagined the conversation she might have with the eye-shadowed woman who worked the register:
“Any weekend plans?” she would be asked, all chipper and sweet.
“Not really,” Lee would shrug in reply, a lie.
On the tinny radio, a disembodied voice announced that it was back to school season, that Karmic Pipe and Tobacco was celebrating. Lee took a sharp turn and hugged the curb where she cruised, passing snarled tree roots thick and strong like bestial tails, surveying the shabby mile-markers of her life. Here was the dry cleaner who had lost all of the pearl buttons from her blouse as a young girl; a stout, hippie house that a school friend had once lived in, where the freezer was full of hot pockets and the nice bottles of whiskey topped off with water; the erotic bakery from which the liberated women of the region ordered “phallic cakes for special occasions”.
In that heat, which, for the record, broke records, every rote familiarity transmogrified into a manacle. Lee wished then, terminal but true, to be driving through a place free of memorials or crutches, to have had no close or distant past, but there on the sidewalk, she couldn’t deny, was a colicky baby being pushed around in a stroller, and just beyond, a new flower pushed itself out of the soil, its waxy leaves rolled tight like scrolls. A dog, dwarfed even by tallish grass, closed his eyes and cocked his ears back preternaturally, turning to meet the wind like a weathervane; a lightning bug flared yellow against the dense, powdery light, which made Lee think: there are still things I don’t know about the world. The car panted hot. Back at home, an unopened letter sat on the desk.
- Penina Warren