She had fitted herself into the corner booth, the one under the smeared window, the last one with the torn red 1956 leatherette seat.
She was sort of blonde, not bleached but just didn’t quite make it, dirty blonde, they call it, mousey. This girl ‘just abouts’ everything, can’t stop looking in the mirror until she can’t stand to look in a mirror and thereby never catching even a momentary glimpse of what she thinks she is looking for, disenchantment slowly filling her up and going hard, inspissating under the dry, brilliant, desiccant of perpetual disappointment. In another age she might have been drawing on a cigarette, taking in deep medicinal draughts and flicking ashes, a little self-conscious, maybe, sitting alone like that, a little defensive, a le old Eddy Hopper, you know, seared with stark electric outlines, the entire world jittering on neon gas—but not out of time.
She never managed to get aboard the 1960s Dreamliner like those other girls with their shimmering hair and their generous soft looks, nestled in big, strong arms, encircled in a blue haze of patchouli oil and marijuana and the late-night flashing rendezvous and the glint of moonlight and beach fires and early morning rainstorms and mordent lightning orchestrating a gray, frowning day.
Now here she is, alone on the platform with an old-fashioned suitcase with straps around each end, like for 1949 or something, hair pulled back in a Geisha bun with a skewer through it, and good, sensible traveling shoes. No makeup, not even lipstick, just her raw, unvarnished self, bobbing around like a tethered helium balloon trying to escape.
The train lets out a long, mournful wail which lances back through the dust and dying light in a last attempt to remain but is pulled along in the smooth frequency diminution of the doppler. Silence rushes past in the slipstream, topsy turvy, tumbling over itself, sparking against the tracks glistening in a sudden, chill rain. Missed it again.
The suitcase is heavy, too heavy and she puts it down, but she can’t figure out what to do with her hands and picks it up again for a moment and walks over to the iron bench and sits, hands now folded in her lap. She glances at her nails but resists the urge to start nibbling at them.
The porter, the very last of his kind in a blue uniform with a cap bearing a red insignia of some kind is pushing a four-wheeled cart, head bowed, seduced by the rhythms of monotony, the stub of a cigar clamped in his jaws producing a diaphoresis of tobacco juice on the cavern walls of his mouth which he periodically expectorates to his left side leaving a trail of brown, oyster splatters at regular intervals.
“Nex’ train tomarra evnin ‘round six o’clock.”
Twenty-two hours. All this time between trains and the platform remains empty except for her and the porter whose owlish face seems painted onto a manikin, his skin dark and wrinkled under the gray-white fuzz growing like moss around his cheeks and jaw, eyes hard as marbles, cats eyes, vertical pupils, slits in a cave wall, all movement deliberate, calculated, slow, methodical, silent. His gait is confident, almost to the point of belligerence.
Twenty-two hours with nowhere to go.
Waiting. Waiting.
Time drawing out like soft taffy, caught in the web, struggling like a locust trying to pull away from the adamantine grip of the silk, but only wrapping herself more and more, fingers, arms, hair.
She wants to weep but can’t produce them, those little silver orbs that carry away the spent effluent of despair. She dry sobs, gasping, filling her lungs and expelling it like a bellows at the steel plant where father worked, bent and blackened, asthmatic, iron filings and coke dust magnetized around his heart and eyes, mother chained to a blue apron, squinting through coke-bottle lenses, skin like dry parchment, the veins dilated and pulsing, tortured lungs hacking through the phlegm of a million cigarettes in a million day kitchen salmagundis of hearts and gizzards stinking in a fulminating cloud of fat and destitution.
She inquires of the porter if she might leave the suitcase for a while, and he points without looking at her or the indicated banks of steel lockers against a brick wall.
“Dollah fo twenty-fo hours. Quawtez ony.”
She forces the heavy brown bag into No. 39 and has to push it several different ways to make it fit. It resists, fighting back, refusing the confinement, begging, pleading before finally releasing itself amid the lamentations of the unforgiven.
She pockets the key and walks through the monumental glass doors of the limestone building into the dying light, sucking in the perfume of honeysuckle and lilac.
Jimmy the Greek’s Athens Café and Pharmacy used to have those satellite juke boxes connected to the main Wurlitzer where you could see the 45 rpm discs selected by a mechanical arm and placed on the turn table. A dime for the longest time was all it took; then three for a quarter; then they just disappeared, like the entire decade, vanishing into the frozen aether at lightspeed to Led Zeppelin’s “How Many More Times”.
Now the café drifts in ignominy, Jimmy having sold out to a company that has painted the walls orange, tore out the satellite jukes and the Wurlitzer, replaced the old wooden tables with melamine. Behind the counter Marina’s ghost still stares out over the sea of disconnected dories bobbing in the clatter and clash of drug pushers and night girls, petty thieves and bent addicts, all rushing into the night, all waiting for sundown where they can pretend to be unnoticed.
She stands, leaving the coffee untouched, a little spiral of steam unwinding from the cup.
The suitcase was removed after seven days and stored in it’s own slot in a rookery of lost and abandoned artifacts, numbered and tagged, unopened, unremembered.
David Greenberg is a former newspaper reporter/editor, truck driver, folk singer and worm picker (a real job) now retired who lives with Miriam, his wife of 54 years in Costa Rica where he makes esoteric furniture.
