2 Written by Melanny Cowley

    “You said you were emancipated,” Glen says, “How did that work after Jesse left?” “We all left,” I tell him, “But me and Maggie had to hide, since we weren’t old enough.” It was only partially true. Jesse got a job doing dairy work in the early mornings.  We lived in the upstairs of an old lady’s house, and everyone knew we were there. Even Nana, but she left us alone. We had to lie on the school paperwork, though. I always signed Nana’s name. I was good at it. I could loop Francis Owen with her fancy F and her fancy O. She was never as nice as her name.
    Sometimes we ran into Nana at the grocery and she would say, “Hello, how are you?” and smile and chit-chat as though she were glad to be rid of us, as though we had never left her at all. I hated faking my way through conversations with her, and I avoided her if I saw the gold Oldsmobile parked outside anywhere. The last time I truly saw her was at city hall, when I signed my emancipation papers. The judge asked her if she had anything to say. She stood up, and brushed invisible lint off her brown, rayon dress. “Well, I suppose not,” she said. I still wonder if the “suppose” part meant anything.

* * *
    A woman enters the subway on the next stop and sits in a seat perpendicular to mine, near the end of the car. I notice everything about her as I study her profile: Her creamy brown skin, her gray, broomstick hair that sticks out beneath her yarn cap, her long wool jacket and her wool socks tucked over the cuffs of her navy sweat pants. She has a large, crocheted burgundy bag. Her shoulders hunch forward, jagged and unnatural, as though they are broken. Her black eyes protrude out of her skull, a little angry, a little frightened. “That poor woman,” I mutter, and I gesture to her. Glen sits silently, and this bothers me, that Glen, who always speaks about anything in particular, has not a thing to say about this woman with the broken shoulders. He doesn’t recognize himself in her eyes.
    For the first time ever, I imagine the subway crashing. I picture an earthquake tossing the car in the air, our bodies suspended for a millifractioned moment of terror before each of us falls and blackens by our violent deaths. Alarmed, I sit on my hands, though I know logically I am not capable of causing an earthquake. Another man from behind our seats starts walking up the car. He’s older, with a white beard, his hands smeared with grease. He approaches the woman with the large eyes.
    “That’s my bag,” he tells her. He grabs it, and leans onto the heels of his feet.
    “Stop it!” She screams. I am on my feet and across the car before I am aware of it.
    “Hey, Stop!” I grab the old man’s wrists and yank. He is strong, but I continue pulling until he lets go.
    “That’s my bag,” he tells me, grabbing his wrists, turning his fingers about them.
    “No it’s not,” I say, and my eyeballs burn.
    My skull is overcome with hatred for him. I want to shove the points of my fingernails into his eye sockets. I want to thrash him with something heavy. I want to throw myself onto him, knock him down and beat cavities into his chest.  He doesn’t appear frightened by me. He turns, and sits only a few seats away, but does not look at either me, or the woman. I look down, having almost forgotten her. She clutches her bag, now soiled, to her chest and eyes me with distrust. I turn around to walk back to my seat, but the subway is at our stop, so I take my food box off my seat, get off with Glen, and begin the short walk up the stairs to my apartment. My palms are streaked with black. I don’t know if it’s grease. It’s powdery, and only slightly sticky. The smudged Styrofoam box squeaks protests in my hands.
    “Why did you do that?” Glen asks me. Quietly, I say I don’t know.
    “I have to say, I’m worried,” Glen says to me, “I’ve never seen that side of you.”
    “What side have you seen?” I ask him.
    But he doesn’t answer my question. We are standing in front of my door, having climbed the three flights, and I don’t think I will ask him in.
“I don’t know if this is working,” Glen says finally, “I mean, when I picture the mother of my children, I guess I just don’t picture someone who behaves that way. It was just…. reckless…. dangerous.”
    Terrified I have been found out, I turn away from him and fumble the key. Thoughts swarm down upon me. Maybe he’s just a wimp. Maybe he is just afraid of commitment. Maybe he just wants straight lace. But maybe, just maybe, he could see the rage I carry in me. Maybe he can see me the way I’m not willing to see myself.
    I want to tell him that I don’t want to see him anymore, either. That I am actually breaking up with him. I want to tell him that he will make a terrible psychologist, that he knows how to recite from his textbooks, but that he is unfamiliar with the logistics of empathy. I want to tell him that his cowboy boots are really stupid.
But I find myself smiling, and it feels odd, like a muscle spasm. “Poor, sweet, innocent Glen,” I say, “You can never know me.”
    I reach up and kiss his cheek, the cheek that is so well shaven it feels much smoother than my own, and then I step inside my apartment and close the door. Brodie, the only real thing, greets me. I wouldn’t have done it. I think about it, but I never do it. I kneel down and try to bury my face in his fur, but it is short, inadequate. He begins licking my face, and this time I don’t push him away. I wonder how smooth my cheek feels to him.

Posted on November 7th, 2008 in Fiction