Douglas Milliken
But it’s much simpler than that. She drives to the car dealership out on the access highway—through the strip-malls left stupefied by July, through the haze rising in tar-melting curtains—to see the man with whom she’s been engaged in some polite euphemism for adultery, the man she’s been fucking but felt guilty for so quit. She does not know why she goes to his work. Just knows that she wants to see him. Not talk. Not touch. Just see. But when she gets there, he’s gone. Day off, or on a test drive, or meeting with someone somewhere else, or any other variation that leads to the same conclusive note of him being gone. She hangs out for a while, first in the lot crowded and gleaming like a nest of silvery beetles, then inside the dealership, in the showroom, where all the walls—even the partitioned offices—are made of glass. A complex of windows. Everyone able to see in. All the salesmen wear nice suits, are built of polished teeth and smiles that hide their eyes, their wingtips dangling inches above the floor as they float like ghouls among the floor-models, endlessly impressing, endlessly impressive.
Uncertain as to why, she plays the part of a clueless housewife with a salesmen with no neck and a tawny suit, lets him impress her with all he knows, lets him guide her about with his sweaty hand on the small of her back. Even sits in his office as he fills out the forms, and it’s there in the center of his glass cell—with the back of her knees sticking to the leather of her chair—that she realizes that this is all wrong. Why is she doing this? This is wrong. She signs someone else’s name to the contract he hands her, then apologizes and tears it up. “I’m sorry.” The hurt in his eyes is animal and real and absolutely horrifying. “You’re not who I came for..” The leather seat peels painfully when she stands, makes a sick wet velcro sound. She flees his office feeling both brutal and victimized, feeling the first-time whore.
Out in the parking lot, a gang of scraggly gulls has descended on the sky-shining ranks, dances among the soft hot tires, poses majestic from windshields and hoods and roofs. They own this place.. Kin of Cain. The Bandit Kings of Nowhere. They own wherever they land. She disburses them with the roar of her car as she pulls out of the lot, onto the road, and they set out to conquer greater lands.
But she doesn’t know where she’s going. She took the afternoon off to see this man—this graceless primate with no manners and an effeminate mouth—and now, objectives denied, she doesn’t know what to do. Outside her air-conditioned bubble, her hermetic seal, the air shimmers, the air bends, the air warps, and suddenly she wonders if reality has a boiling point. She wonders if dreams are just the vapors dissipating into space. But that’s the sort of thing her husband might come up with. A man given wholly to the vapors.
Through the radio, a man’s voice delivers the impossible temperature, the impossibly low wind-speed, the ridiculous fact that it’s been four weeks without rain. Twenty-seven days. Just vapors dissipating into space.
She should go home to her husband, she thinks. Make him dinner.. Draw him a cool bath. She should do a lot of things. She pulls off at a dairy bar instead, some mom-and-pop ice cream operation at the edge of town. A white hut and a dirt lot and a peripheral fringe of patchy, dying grass. All the cars in the lot are parked in a compound semi-circle with the dairy bar at the center, pagans gathered around the altar. She parks at the farthest edge, away from everyone, one tire touching the dying grass.
Beyond the grass runs a corroded guardrail. Beyond the rail stands a dark fortress of pines and an embankment dropping sharply to some minor river. The sort of place teenagers get high and break bottles and occasionally drown in. Inside her car, she tries something like crying, but it doesn’t work. Her eyes burn with wet, but the action in her chest feels more like dry heaving. It hurts, and is embarrassing. She can’t even cry right. She gets out and approaches the dairy bar, stands in line, tries to stop feeling so sorry for herself. Surrounded by dirty-faced little children and overweight moms sipping cigarettes. Everyone hot and tired but uplifted by the common promise of ice cream.
She orders a banana split, and by the time it arrives in a broad plastic dish, she almost wants it. But in the short walk back to her car, it melts. The fudge a septic river creeping through the viscous vanilla soup. The whipped cream a flaccid wad. The cherry a scarlet joke. All ganging up to force the banana down, to sink this pale and lifeless ship.
Her stomach turns and her fingers numb. She drops the sundae in the dust.
Two little boys with not shirts chase one another around the dirt lot, whooping and waving their cones. She walks past her car and onto the dying grass, up to the guardrail, leans her hips against its rusty edge. In the pine shadows, she listens to the river down below, murmuring and blameless, close enough for her to hear but invisible among the trees. She imagines jumping the rail and making the steeping descent, slipping off her shoes and sinking her feet into the burble and purl.. Imagines becoming perfectly still with the stones beneath her and the current around her as everything floats on by. She imagines, but she does not move. Without even a breeze to stir her hair, she does not move. Kin of Cain. The Bandit Queen of Nowhere. She leans against the guardrail and stands in dying grass while imagining something much better than this, then turns back toward the dust and bar to clean up the mess she’s made.
