AN AIRPORT ENCOUNTER

by Marianne Carlson

Tony was early. As he sat waiting in the generic holding pen the airlines created for passengers waiting to board, he watched her. Not especially attractive, yet for reasons unclear to him he couldn't stop himself from staring. She had the gift of youth, both a blessing and a curse - blessed to have a face clear of wrinkles or lines, yet her face lacked character, like a mannequin in Macy's window.  She was remarkably thin.

     He checked his iPhone for messages. Nothing new. Now she was looking at him, her eyes somehow veiled as if glossed over by a microscopic film, yet he could tell she noticed him.  He couldn’t read her, he didn't know what to do. Approach or avoid? She looked at him with a half smile, almost a smirk,  as she removed her black leather jacket with a jerky impatience, took one more sip from her Starbucks cardboard cup and began leafing through a magazine, abruptly turning pages. Somehow he found her more attractive when she not smiling. 

Every page seemed to annoy her. Everything seemed to annoy her, the magazine, the airport, the waiting passengers, life. She reminded him of a small stuffed animal, a tiger maybe or a lion that had suddenly been given the gift of life and had no idea what to do with it. From her boots to her thick mantle of hair, she was an enigma, but an enigma with fantastic energy who dominated the space they inhabited.

“Flight 460 to New York City has been cancelled due to inclement weather on the East Coast. Please check with the American Airlines ticket agent for rescheduling.”  Like sheep in a pen, they gathered up their belongings,  lap tops, briefcases, bags of half eaten food. The herd stood in line, approximately 25 disgruntled sheep, baying discontentedly. Tony stood behind the girl with the hair, a time bomb waiting to explode.

“Here we go again.” She spoke to no one in particular, but Tony took this as a good omen, and did not hesitate to answer. If he thought she appeared annoyed before, it was nothing compared to her present anger.

“We can’t blame the airline for the weather.”

“Why not?” 

“Well, it’s not their fault,” he answered weakly. 

By the time they reached the ticket agent, it was clear that they would not be going anywhere for awhile. Flights were cancelled up and down the coast, and both Isabelle and Tony were marooned, at least for the foreseeable future. While in line he learned that her name was Isabelle. It suited her.

“Tony? Is it really? I was engaged to a Tony. I will call you Anthony, Tony brings back very bad memories.”

“You can call me whatever you like.” Actually no one ever called  him Anthony, it felt as if she was talking to a stranger.

“Like a drink? It looks like we have nothing but time.”

“Sure.”

They made their way to a bar with a huge flat screen TV broadcasting a Knicks game. The volume was way too loud. She grabbed the last remaining table while he ordered a couple of beers. Between the Knicks and the disgruntled passengers, the atmosphere was anything but intimate, yet as soon as they sat down she began.

“I just had a marathon session with my boss, begging, pleading with him not to fire me, but he fired me anyway. I thought I  was more persuasive, but not so. It was: don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

“Oh, I am sorry to hear that.” He was surprised, she didn’t look to me like the type that spills all but he was to be in for quite a ride. She held her mug lightly, playing with the frost.  He couldn’t take his eyes off her hands, they were so beautiful.  She could have been a hand model, advertising soap or toilet paper with her long tapered fingers. Anything soft. 

“Where do you work?”

“Where did I work, is more like it.”

“Sorry, where did you work?”

“Rhinehart Labs. It’s a small laboratory in Los Angeles.”

“You’re a scientist?”

“You could call it that. Actually I am a chemist.

“I never would have guessed it.” His work in the art department in a small Hollywood film studio suddenly seemed insignificant, almost demeaning.

I was working on a huge project. Rhinehart perfected salt water chlorination, a replacement for chlorine  used in swimming pools.” 

“Really?”

“Yes, it was going great guns. YMCA pools all over the country were converting to salt water when suddenly people began to get sick. Certain viruses popped up. 

“Oh?” 

“A little boy died, we were sued, the Y’s stopped using our system, and that in a nutshell was that. Twenty of us were laid off, I was the first to go. 

“But it sounds as if you were on to something. Couldn’t the formula have been tweaked, perfected, made stronger?

“Yes, but the law suit wiped us out. And someone died. A little boy died, and I feel responsible.”

The transformation in Isabelle was remarkable. Tony sat in stunned silence as she dropped her mask. What remained was hard to look at: confusion, guilt,  the horror of the death of a child, and he began to feel uncomfortable because he realized that he was the first person she had confided in. Her pain was unbearable, he wasn’t equipped to handle it.

“I feel responsible. I was the one who signed off on the formula. I should have tested it further, but we were all in such a hurry to go forward with this. The money was unbelievable.”

The Knicks game ended. They lost in an overtime. Strangely the two strangers were aware of the score as they discussed the death of a six year old boy who had lived in Dayton, Ohio. It served as a form of comic relief to an otherwise excruciating topic.

“Perhaps you should go to Dayton, visit his parents?” Where that  came from Tony did not know but it was exactly the right thing to say.

“Will you come with me?”

“I will.” 

An exhausted ticket agent asked Isabelle, then Tony where they were going. They both changed their reservation to Dayton and waited in the same holding pen. Neither would ever be the same again. 

 

OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

by Marianne Carlson

We were to meet for lunch at a place called Annabelle's, located in a small town on the coast off of Route One. It has been ten years since last we met, and the passage of time has done little to enhance my appearance. Someone once told me that women age like apples on the branch of a tree, some are round, oozing fat, others shrivel up like a prune. I am of the prune variety. Lately I have felt as if my life was in fast forward, frames whipping by, one after another. How unseemly. It is as if someone or something has been putting a heavy hand on those two little forward arrows on the remote of my life. People, places, things whiz by so quickly - one day rolls into another and then one day I  looked into a mirror. The prune stage has arrived.

I was early.  I am always early, I bring my Kindle everywhere, along with my other electronic toys.  God forbid I should miss a text, an email, a headline informing me that there has been yet another mass shooting, another semi-automatic in the hands of some  disenchanted young man, his mind full of a diabolical  plan to wipe out an entire movie theatre. 

The walls of Annabelle’s are lined with mirrors, the mirrors enable one to view the booth behind you. It has always been unclear to me what “objects in the mirror are closer than they appear" actually means. I do know that in my case “the object” is the prune. If I sit back will the prune go away, or if I sit closer will the prune reverse ten years? Not wanting to appear vain, I surreptitiously  checked myself out. (Who me, vain? The truth is I have been slightly in love with myself my entire life, one reason why the prune is so unwelcome.) The prune was intact. I then fished for my glasses in my over-sized tote bag that looks like a tapestry, chiding myself for spending  way too much money on that bag, turned on my Kindle, and prepared to dive into Edith Wharton.

“Do you think you are suicidal?” I had given a cursory glance to  the couple in the booth behind me but thanks to the aforementioned mirrors, I could easily see the couple from my vantage point.  They made no effort to keep their voices down, this was voyeurism at its best. 

Her beauty stunned me. It was hard to determine her age.  She was, however, at the zenith of her glory and she knew it. Her skin had a transparent glow without makeup, she didn’t appear to wear makeup of any kind, and yet she was the personification of a perfect Vogue model. Her thick curly black hair pulled back with a head band revealed her eyes, a soft blue, like a Siamese cat, but there was something in those eyes that frightened me. And there was something else. How could a young woman with so much charisma be so unhappy? She exuded unhappiness, it oozed from every pore.

“No, but I have taken up cutting again,” she told her companion, as if this was a good thing.  Her companion, a young man also of indeterminate age, seemed to have a skill blessed by few. He listened.  He listened in between her rants and responded carefully.  Although there was nothing outstanding about his appearance, he was at the same time both kind and rather funny, at least he tried to interject humor into a very dicey conversation.

“Oh, great. When in doubt, bring out those razor blades.” 

“I think I started the cutting because I am off all my meds.  Every damn one of them.”

“Why?”

“Because I am sick of being the poster child for every pharmaceutical product on the market.”

“A Chloe off meds is a scary Chloe indeed,  what does your shrink say?”

“Good news and bad news.”

“Hit me with the good news first.”

“He has finally diagnosed me, I have a borderline personality disorder.”  

“And the bad news?”

“Borderlines are horrible people, Sean.”

“How could you be a horrible person. Chloe? Maybe a little sadistic from time to time, but horrible? No.”

“Yes, horrible. I read all about borderlines and we do terrible things. We are surrounded by people who love us and then we systematically pit one against the other and cause chaos. Do you realize I have  alienated just about every person in my life”

“Well, Chloe, sleeping with your boss wasn’t very wise.”

“I know, I don’t even like him, I just did it because I could. And what is so bizarre about it is that I truly like his wife, it’s just that she is one of these perfect people that you want to strangle because of the fact that they are so damn perfect.” 

“And so the solution of this is to go off your meds?” Sean had a habit of cocking his head like a parakeet while he talked. It made him look simultaneously quizzical, interested and surprised, quite a talent. I’ll have to practice it, it may come in handy. 

“Who knows, but I have decided to grab the reins and take control of my life.”

“How, by turning yourself into a chopping block?”

“Yes. I never thought of it that way, but yes. I need to punish myself.  Even though I got the monkey off my back, the circus is still in town.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means what it means, if you don’t get it, I can’t explain it. I slice myself in front of a small picture of St. Francis.”

“Why St. Francis?”

“I love St. Francis. I love the fact that he was a naughty boy before he became a saint.  And you can’t find fault with “Lord, make me an instrument  of your peace.” It doesn’t get any better than that.”

“I don’t think St. Francis had razors in mind when he was talking about instruments.”

“Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.”

All this was going on when a vaguely familiar face walked through the door at Annabelle’s, smiling at every pretty female  over the age of sixteen. Of course. Some things never change. He walked with a limp. A limp? What’s that all about? A flood of memories, all heavily laden with emotions hit me like a ton of bricks as he slid into the booth opposite me. Damn, I thought, I really believed that I had outgrown all this teenage crush stuff. 

"Hello.'

"Well, hello."

"Well hello back."

Peter graduated from The Harvard Business School, and I matriculated at Oberlin College in Ohio with a Visual Arts degree.  One would think that one of us could use the king's English more effectively, but there we were, stuttering and stammering like two ESL students. He is not what one could call a handsome man. Bald, thick glasses, a pouch, not  a snappy dresser, but what he lacked in style, he made up for with self-assurance, and for good reason. He had one of those effulgent personalities that triggered an instant response. Whereas I tended to turn people away, Peter was always one of those laconic souls who welcomed everyone with open arms.

"I see your ads on TV all the time, that peculiar little man selling Thompson Auto Parts," I said. Peter stared at me as if I was a puzzling object on a shelf in a gift shop. 

“ Goddamned television, we have to appeal to useful idiots in order to sell anything these days." There was the feisty Peter I had loved so much ten long years ago, but ten years is a long time, and much to my chagrin I found myself wishing he would be quiet so that I could continue my voyeurism.

“Why the limp?”

“Do you really want to know?” He looked sheepish, somewhat embarrassed and for the life of me I couldn’t imagine why, but then I recalled that Peter was always full of surprises. For a conservative fellow, he definitely had an impish element to his personality.

“I shot myself in the knee.”

“You what?!” 

“You heard me, I was cleaning my gun, and it went off.  It was stupid. I know better.”

“But you’re ok now?”

“Not one hundred percent, but a lot better than I was. I really don’t want to talk it.”

“Are you still a card carrying member of the NRA?”

“Absolutely, gotta be able to defend myself. Let’s talk about you.”

“I look like a prune.”

“No you don’t, you look great.” Well, maybe  a little bit prunish”

“Prunish or prudish?”  I hoped I wasn’t snapping at him, it was never my intention to snap.

“You never used to be a prude.”

“That was before I went off my meds.”  What in the world made me say that? I had the rather frightening sense that I was reciting lines from some theatre production,  I had taken up where the pair in the next booth left off. 

“What meds? Are you on medication?  You’re not sniffing glue, are you? Peter looked at me quizzically as I cocked my head like a parakeet, hoping that I looked oh so wise. Peter told me about his recuperation, his retirement, his daughters. I listened with one ear, while out of the corner of my eye I watched the mirror which made the objects closer than they appeared. I wanted to know what happened, I wanted to know why Chloe was cutting herself, and I wanted to know if she and Sean were lovers, former lovers or just friends.  

GOOD BUT NOT GOOD

by Marianne Carlson

After my father’s stroke his speech never fully returned. The speech therapist at the rehab where he lay recovering told us it might or it might not. Occupational therapists taught him how to navigate through daily hurdles with his left hand: tying shoes, eating, writing. Physical therapists taught him how to walk while dragging his right foot. Up and down the hall they would go, my father pushing the walker, the sweet young therapist with her SLOW BUT STEADY WINS THE RACE  orange plastic wrist band, her smile that could melt a curmudgeon, encouraging his every step. My father, behaving like a monster, growled and grunted as they slowly made their way up and down the hall. Would it have killed him to return one of her smiles?

When we finally brought him home, we set him up downstairs in the family room.  It was to be his habitat, perfect really, there was a connecting bathroom. The room was bright and sunny, although he kept the shades down almost all the time, and in spite of our efforts, he gave up on everything. We installed bookshelves for his favorite books, a computer with a handicapped keyboard, stereo equipment. He never read or listened to music again, and when we encouraged him to communicate, he would look around and shake his head back and forth like the head of a turtle peeping out of his shell. He could say a few things, his standard answer to every question was “good but not good.”

My daughter, Brice, was a senior in high school when he died.  A precocious child, she quietly soaked up her environment like a sponge, I thought he was but a shadowy presence in her life, but I came to realize that he was much more. The grumpy old man in the dark room who never talked left an indelible impact on her life as she grew into a beautiful, troubled young woman. Since I worked long hours as a therapist, I was rarely home when Brice got home from school. As I look back on it, I was rarely home, period. How could I have been so unaware of the endless hours that that improbable pair spent together? Today, as I walk through the house, I see the many framed photographs of Brice as she passed  from one stage of development to the next with a new clarity.  How could I have missed the ever present sadness, the pain in her eyes? I am a therapist, I should have seen what was happening under my own roof.

Brice rarely smiled. Uncommonly beautiful, she had every gift a generous universe could offer. Tall, almost statuesque, she possessed a natural charisma. When she walked into a room, people noticed her, yet there was a disturbance somewhere behind her innocuous expression. It was as if she knew something, and whatever that something was, it wore her down. Her teachers told me she was a loner, she had no interest in her classmates. What held her interest was chemistry. Chemistry and math. And sometimes sports.

“Why do you drag your foot like that?”  Her soccer coach  pulled Brice aside one day after practice.

“Do I? I never noticed.”

“Yes, you do. You would be a much more effective fielder if you could break yourself of the habit.”

“I’ll try.” But she didn’t try, not at all. It was as if she was limping up and down the field.  Soon after that she quit soccer.

Her knapsack was too heavy. I worried about that, I worried that the heavy knapsack might hurt her back, but I was woefully unaware that my worries were misplaced.  What we worry about rarely happens, it’s what we never worry about that can blind-side us. 

Every day, as soon as she got home from school, she took her knapsack upstairs to her room and unpacked the many scientific journals and math quizzes, piling them neatly on her desk. She then had a snack, usually tea and a bagel. She made two, one for her, one for her grandfather. Balancing the two mugs of tea and the two bagels on a tray, she knocked twice  and entered. She often brought him flowers. They rarely talked, he couldn’t and she preferred the silence. One day I came home early, a crippling migraine caused me to cancel my afternoon sessions. Brice was unaware that I lay on the couch in the living room.

“Hi Pops, how’s it going?”

“Good but not good.”

“Likewise. School sucks.  Good but not good. But I got an “A” on my calculus exam.”

“Good.”

“My guidance counselor thinks I will be accepted at Harvard, or if not Harvard, Princeton.”

“Good but not good.”

So much remained unsaid, there was a lapse in the conversation, a lapse where something transpired between the two of them. It sounded as if they were working on something which I found rather odd, but in retrospect, I should have paid more attention. Hindsight is always 20/20.

“Don’t worry, Pops, I am sure it will work.” (She is sure WHAT will work, what are they doing in there?)

Two weeks later I discovered them, Brice in her recently purchased senior prom dress, my father in a long forgotten suit. Carbon monoxide killed them both. She was on his lap, he held her like a young child.

 

NO ONE EVER DIED OF A BROKEN HEART

by Marianne Carlson

It has been my experience that well-meaning people say, “You’ll get over it, put on a happy face.  You’ll see, no one ever died of a broken heart.” These same well-meaning people also will tell you, “No one ever died from lack of sleep.”

     Wrong. I have known many people who are driven close to suicide because they CAN’T SLEEP! But I digress, and besides, Marva was a sound sleeper. It is I who can’t sleep. I sometimes wonder if I will ever get a good night’s sleep again because it is when I go to bed, try to sleep, that my defenses are down and this sense of overwhelming sadness creeps in almost drowning me with sorrow.

     “Come on, Otis, out you go.” Marva’s constant companion the once feisty black and white Boston Terrier, sniffed at the door before stepping out. He used to be  energetic,  happy, curious. Now he exists only to look for Marva behind every bush and tree.  His once trusting eyes are subdued, any glimmer of hope has long been snuffed out. We go to bed together at night. He sleeps at the foot of my bed, his little paws occasionally in motion, dreaming most probably of Marva. I take comfort from his presence but cannot sleep.

“I met the nicest man today.”

“Oh?”

“And believe it or not, he’s not married.”

“Or so he says,” I remember answering. Once a cynic, always a cynic. Marva smiled.

“I want you to meet him.”

We met later that week at Annabelle’s, the local hang out where everyone knows everyone, but no one knew Curt. He seemed to have blown into town from another planet. Annabelle’s was hopping that night, I remember there was a peculiar unreal atmosphere.  Both Marva and Curt were strangely animated. I didn’t like Curt at all, he made the hair on the back of my neck rise. Marva glowed. I had never seen her like this, right from the getgo, he possessed a certain power over her which spelled trouble. It was his eyes. Curt had Rasputin eyes, and all his sweet talk couldn’t negate the glaring contradiction emanating from his eyes which I translated as pure evil. Marva didn’t see it, she was “blinded by the light” in every sense of the word.

“Marva, you need to read Carl Jung again. Your projections are blinding you.”

“What projections?” 

“What projections? Give me a break. You don’t know anything about this guy. For all we know he has been incarcerated.”

“Well what if he was? It would have made him a better person.”

“I am simply saying you need to take it slow. Get to know him a little better. Look at Otis. Even Otis is upset.”

It was true. Otis did not like Curt either. Low rumbles from deep within his throat reached the surface of his being every time Curt came within three feet of Marva. 

I have examined and reexamined my behavior ever since. Was I jealous? Maybe, but I was more concerned than jealous because with every passing day Marva decompensated. Her beautiful mane of thick blonde hair became limp. She used to light up a room, now her skin was sallow, she looked unkempt, her lovely blue eyes dulled. When they were together she always stood behind Curt allowing him to dominate the conversation. My once happy, opinionated friend became a mouse in front of my very eyes as I stood by and allowed it to happen. There was no reckoning with her. She took her cues from Curt. If Curt laughed, Marva laughed, if Curt didn’t like something, Marva didn’t like it. She became a shell of her former self.

“Curt doesn’t love me any more.” Marva and I were having lunch in her once pristine kitchen, now littered with dirty dishes, baskets full of dirty laundry, piles of unpaid bills. Those unpaid bills should have been a huge red flag, Marva was a stickler with her money, she never allowed her credit cards to go unpaid. Otis was lying next to her, his eyes half closed as if he feared something would happen to her if he slept. In retrospect, Otis was right not to sleep. This was to be the last time I saw her.

“I have become a stalker.”

“A stalker? My God Marva, you really need to get a grip.”

“I can’t help myself. Curt is cutting me cold. I need to know who he is seeing behind my back.”

It was many months later that she texted me. “In Kansas with Curt. Very happy.”

Kansas? What the_____? Marva is a city girl. Hurt beyond belief, I couldn’t believe that my closest friend,  my BFF, would leave without so much as a fare thee well.  Since Jr. High School we had been inseparable. She was my touchstone.  And all this for a piece of shit like Curt?    

I’m still not over it, I’ll never fully get over it, life doesn’t have the luster of days gone by. One morning I awoke and realized that Otis was not at the foot of my bed. I missed his weight snuggled up on top of my feet, keeping them warm. I went to my back door and found his lifeless body on the porch. The vet couldn’t find anything wrong with him, he told me he died of “natural causes” but I know why he died. Otis died of a broken heart.