The sun faded gaily on a lucrative day. Carmen climbed back in her car. She took a joint from a cigarette compartment and sparked it.
This helped ease the pain of living in a town where everyone watched TV. She looked up at the billboard and saw an ad for, you guessed it, TV. The witching hour was sure a long one.
She thought maybe she’d stop into this one gas station to get a candy bar, she wasn’t hungry but she just wanted to bother this one dude Steve, who worked there. He was never in that great of mood, but she remembered when he had been. They’d gone to high school together.
Now, Steve, for all his frenetic hand motions and unbecoming coloration around the eyes, was filled with ideas, you had to say that about him. Carmen even got a little intimidated thinking about Steve’s voodoo book he was always reading when there were no customers, like maybe he’d try some on her.
Eh, I better not go in, she thought. She continued driving on, to her country home just past the mall.
Good, she thought, this was a Wednesday, so there wouldn’t be as many black people darting in front of her to catch the bus. Though they were so good at that, she thought. It was almost better entertainment than TV, watching them do that, getting ready to go do business, or to go back to their families, all dressed up in suits no matter the weather. Eh, she didn’t need that tonight. She was off tomorrow, and had Rachel after school. They’d go get milk shakes from somewhere in the middle of town, just how she liked it, amidst the to and fro of automobiles and sundry lurid secular array, she’d read Rachel a story and Rachel would laugh, such a sweetheart. Sitting there enjoying her milkshake.
Though both of them, truly, would still be thinking about Scott. He’d been an alcoholic, had beaten her and gone to jail, and now he’d have to get through a social worker legally, or police illegally, to get back at Carmen.
But his aura seemed to hang over every milk shake occasion, nonetheless. Christ, thought Carmen, you try to do something normal. You try to make it in life. She thought of all the shaky-handed, timid guys who came in the record store, always buying like the latest thing on pitchfork, always trying to give her some poignant eye contact, timed all fake and everything. Scott had never been like that. He listened to rap, but he wasn’t the type to even think about music. He rode motorcycles. His heart was tuned to the setting sun, he was a true cowboy of the Midwest, six-foot-six, damn near indestructible, covered in tattoos, loud-speaking and loud living.
And no matter how much Carmen talked at these milk shake occasions, there always seemed to be a silence. A timid silence. Christ, she thought, this isn’t how I wanted my daughter to grow up. Around silence.
She would take her to sports games, but those cost money.
Rachel would always be drawing in some little coloring book, or playing with some little doll.
“What’s your doll’s name again?” asked Carmen.
“Saaaaaadie,” answered her little daughter Rachel.
“She’s cute,” said Carmen, “but not as cute as you.”
Rachel laughed uneasily.
Christ, thought Carmen, I’m turning into my mom. She always used to say that, and I never used to know how to respond.
Carmen thought she’d text her friend and see if she wanted to go to the zoo. Sure, she said, I’ll round up Billy when I get off at 6 and we should make it before they close.
That oughta make for some bilious rabble-rousing, thought Carmen. Like a little science experiment, putting a six-year-old boy and girl together. It was just like love, how sex hurt so bad, but without it, what were you? It was just a streaming into neverending silence, into neverending low-energy.
She felt like she were doing her dad a disservice whenever her life were static, whenever, even, she found herself enjoying something too much. He’d died in the service when she was 14, over in the first Iraq war, and Carmen was an only child. She and her mom used to go to the places they’d gone with him, and things only seemed to get better and better, these places were on the other town, and Carmen and her mom laughed as they told stories, and then laughed even more, to cover up the fumigating hue they saw in each other’s eyes, the joy they knew was precluded by the prospecting natural passage of time. And the radio towers dialed in over the cornfields, and life was continually a crashing, a giving and getting of antennae signals as you listened to the radio in your sedans, as waves broke in on the shore of Lake Michigan.
Becky was self-conscious when they met in the zoo parking lot. It was one of those evenings when everything seemed to rest upon stilts, and time itself seemed to be watching you. She just kept looking at Rachel and smiling, almost hoping that Carmen wouldn’t pick up on too many of her vibes.
Her son Billy noticed this, and it made him sedate, as a necessity. It’s so sad when necessities are needs. Rachel noticed that Billy was tense, just looking at the ground, and a sadness entered the six-year-old girl. This is what life seems to be, she told herself.
“Do you feel like going into the zoo?” asked Becky. “Maybe we could just go sit at one of the picnic tables and chat, it’s such a nice night. I brought these mini muffins we could all share.” Becky was proud of herself for thinking on the spot like this, reaching this impromptu solution. She worked in HR, finding solutions to things.
And Carmen was happy to do this too. In truth, the only thing she’d felt like doing was going in and looking at the peacocks. She wanted to become hypnotized by the patterns of their plumage, so that the little shapes would become almost like a rhythm in her mind, for it’s in the minute that we find change, the grand stays the same all through life.
Billy took a friendly disposition to Rachel.
“What school do you go to?” he asked.
“Jaaaackson.”
“I heard they have rats in there.”
“They don’t have rats, stupid!”
“Now be nice, Rachel,” said Carmen.
Becky just laughed. She felt like putting her arm around Carmen, because she sensed a sadness about her. Putting an arm around, as would have been more accepted and acceptable in other countries. But in America, they each had their own bank accounts. They each had their own social security numbers. The dormant, lipid rhythm of machines exited and reentered your life in a pattern that entirely defined you as a person, and it was up to the individual to carve out his or her own niche amidst the rhythm, amidst the buzzing in the air that said that lives do not matter, that said that we should go abroad and kill innocent people so that SUV companies can be bailed out and their blood siphon can be cheaper.
Carmen was attractive, so there was less of an obligation on her part to keep up conversation. She simply glimpsed over at the zoo, which they’d chosen not to go into. The full green foliage was starting to form on the trees over the little stream.
“So Billy I heard you’re quite the piano player,” she finally said, after an amount of silence that the median mind may have found awkward.
“Yup,” he said, simply.
“Yeah,” continued Becky, “he’s got a recital coming next Thursday at the church.”
“Ooh,” said Carmen, “I’d love to come watch it!”
Billy’s thought process was locked into a low-frequency masculinity undetectable by the female eye. He was scared stiff by recitals, all of them. It wasn’t his playing that he was nervous about, it was just the basic realities — the uncontrolled awe of a little girl his age running up there in a skirt, running, even though everyone else walked, there was one girl who ran, Natalia, and she looked so regular, so everyday, yet she wasn’t everyday in any way, and all the parents laughed when she ran, she a little ball of glee, in rain or sun, bowing, bidding the pedestrian goodbye, that is until Billy, who would perpetuate the regularity of things with a performance which was now to be viewed by an additional acquaintance. Billy knew that this night was nothing.