Thisby waited in the very back of the Diner,
in the shadows, away from the windows. He told his wife he was going
bowling, and that he would be home by 7:30, maybe 8:00. It was
5:30. He was late but he would be there. She was dressed in
red. This was her Valentine’s Day.
She looked around the Diner for a
waitress and spotted a little girl in a Catholic school uniform who was talking
to a smiling Nick the Greek. Over at the counter a dapper, older man was
having a lively conversation with a handsome older woman. A pensive young
man in his early 30s was sitting alone in a booth by the front door,
alternating his gaze from the parking lot to the lobby.
She watched an exhausted looking,
heavyset young black woman in a security guard’s uniform step off the New Haven
bus and walk out into the pouring rain that drenched her. Yet she didn’t
run. She walked in a slow, methodical fashion, her large arms swinging at her
sides, the flesh squeezing out from around the short sleeve cuffs that were too
tight for her big body. She watched her enter the Diner and could hear
her asking the waitress for an application and the waitress telling her that
they weren’t hiring and that they were even cutting her hours back.
Towards the front in one of
the booths was that English teacher from high school, Mister…what was his
name? She’d forgotten it, but she remembered he was a nice man. Who
was that he was with? His daughter? Or a girlfriend, maybe?
When the waitress arrived, she
ordered her usual, a diet plate with water. When the waitress left she looked
herself over and decided, once again, that she was heavy in all the wrong
places and the salad and ice water was another last ditch attempt to fight
back. What she wanted was a turkey club with fries and a shake. In
fact, it’s usually what she ordered when she wasn’t waiting for him. But
he would be there, any minute now. He could never give her an exact time,
and shortly after he arrived, she would follow him to the Motel 6 up on Route
8, always three cars lengths behind to be sure they weren’t followed.
He’d have her clothes off in minutes and she wanted to look good, and if she
couldn’t look good, she would at least not look too fat.
This waiting was always the
same. She would munch on her saltines and cottage cheese and wait.
She wondered if the school counselor was right when he said that her problem
was that she didn’t think much of herself. She wondered if that was why
she drank too much, and she did drink too much, and she often wondered if she
was an alcoholic.
She came from the working
poor. She was working poor and everything she had, and everything she had
ever owned was old, or used or mended. Even now, she barely made enough
to buy anything new. She recalled that in the twenty years of her life
that she had never taken any friends into the house because she didn’t want
them to see the way she lived. It would be an embarrassment. She
thought that one day she would move out and get her own place but she was
concerned that wouldn’t happen. She would live there for the next thirty
years, until she died and they would find her lying on the couch. She’d
have been there for a while. She would die from alcohol and
cigarettes. She shook her head to make the thought go away faster and looked
around the restaurant to be sure there was no one there who knew her or him.
She loved him but she was
beginning to think he didn’t love her like he said he did. Maybe he was just
using her for sex. She knew his wife from school. She was pretty and
tall and men acted stupid when she was around. She felt guilty for what
she was doing. He told her that he wasn’t happy. He said he married
too quickly. He should have waited. He was going to leave
her. He promised her he would and she believed him a lot at first, but
now, well now, not so much as before.
She looked at her twisted
reflection in the bright metal strip at the end of the booth. She knew
she was homely, that her chubby face was scarred, ravaged really, with
acne. She was aware that her hair was a frenzied shock of brown that
leaped into a dozen different directions at once and, adding insult to injury,
she was short, shorter than most people, but wider than most people. She
knew she wasn’t particularly bright nor was she particularly dull, but she was
void of all and any verbal eloquence. So the words were never there for
her, and people figured she was dense. But she wasn’t. She was
average. She was just average. She was okay with that, with being
average.
She turned to look out the
window, staring into the rain and again saw her reflection, her entire
reflection. She was fat. All her life, she and fat were
synonymous. She thought how she never got asked to dance, and she loved
to dance. Sometimes when she was alone in her room she would dance by
herself with the radio on.
“Isn’t that sad?” she said
softly.
That morning, she had taken an
early lunch with people from her office including that new guy from accounting,
the one with the blue eyes. They were walking back to the office, talking
and having fun when a car full of teens drove by and screamed at her, “Get off
the road, lard ass!”
It had happened to her before,
and when it does you’re never alone. It always happens in front of other
people, people you like and people you pray to God like you back.
The cute guy from accounting
heard it but all she could do was to pretend as if she didn't hear a
thing. But you know all the time that he’s standing there thinking,
"I hope she didn't hear that.”
She thought that sometimes it
would be such a relief to be able to disappear. Well, maybe not
disappear, just not to be such a visible walking target for people to project
their aggression onto. It’s easy for someone to joke about scars if
they’ve never been cut.
She tried so hard to lose weight.
She hated all the energy that the struggle sapped out of her. She hated
going through every day knowing that she was considered unattractive by a huge
percentage of the population because of something she couldn’t help.
“I hate hating my body,” she whispered
aloud.
She loved him. She loved
him from the moment she first saw him in the hallway in junior high. Was
it eight years ago? She would go on loving him until the day she
died. It wasn’t fair. One day he strolled into her life and smiled
at her or something simple like that and her life wasn’t her own anymore.
She was a hostage of sorts. That was how she reasoned it all away.
That love had taken her hostage bit by bit. First it captured her imagination,
and then it stole her heart and finally it took her soul.
It started after
graduation. They were part of the same crowd. He waited for her
when others left her behind and he held doors for her. He listened to
her. He was interested in what she had to say. And because of all
those things, she spoke to him freely and revealed herself to him in long
conversations sitting on the grass by Colony Pond. She had long ago
forgotten the words he spoke to her but for the remainder of her life she would
never forget how those words made her feel important and safe. She never
forgot anything about him, the way he stood, the way he sounded, and a hundred
little things.
As the months went by, the
crowd thinned. A few left for college, others for the army. She
stayed. He stayed. He married his wife and began his affair with
her a few weeks later. There were other men that came through her life,
but the love she couldn’t have was the love that lasted the longest, took the
biggest toll, felt the strongest, and hurt the deepest.
She wondered what would
happen if she ended it. Would she fall out of love? Can a person
fall out of love, true love? Does that happen, she wondered? Is it
possible that there is an emotion so powerful that it finds a place in our
soul? Is true love eternal?
What they were doing was wrong and it bothered
her. It made her feel cheap...he made her feel cheap. It was a sort
of madness. She liked to think that in a world filled with self-serving
practicality there was something noble in her undying love for him. It
was unselfish and stoic and all the other right reasons. All that she
wanted was to be something in his life, but she knew in her heart of hearts,
that their turn would never come. Her head was leaned against the window
curtains and in her nostrils was the odor of dusty linen.
She could stop the hurt he caused
her and she could stop it now. She could end it tonight, now, here, at
this moment. All she had to do was get up and leave.