In Her Eyes

by Renée J. Lukas

  “Why so soon?” He grinned, slurring his words. When I got a quick look at him, he seemed like one of those middle-aged guys trying to relive his youth. He had a few sweaty hairs pulled across his balding head.

  “’Cause I’m a big star,” I said sarcastically. “I don’t have time.” I slung my guitar over my shoulder and headed for the door.

  “I’ve got a gig for you,” the man said.

  I turned around. He seemed like a businessman in a button-down shirt, his face and voice suddenly sober. Had it all been an act?

  “You’re good,” he said again. “I book bands for a club up in Boston. You interested?”

  “Not if it requires a favor,” I said. I was cynical. I caught Jerry’s eye, held up my finger to let him know it was okay, for now.

  “Oh, that,” the man said. “I was playing.”

  “Playing like a drunken asshole?”

  “Yeah.” He smiled broadly. “I like to see who’s professional and who’s going to get rattled. I don’t hire redneck bands.”

  “What?”

  “If you’d started throwing chairs or something, I would’ve left.”

  “So as long as we can take it from assholes…” I considered this odd rationale. “What kind of club is this?”

  “A reasonable question.” Still smiling. “It’s nothing like this. You just have to be tough. The worst you’ll have to deal with are the critics.”

  He slipped me his card.

  In the van I rocked back and forth, staring at the card and smelling beer and piss, and seriously considered his offer. After all, how many more Northport bars could I play?

  That’s how we got to Boston.

  As shitty as my hometown was, there was something scary about leaving what was known. At least I knew the kinds of assholes that populated the bars nearby. The unknown was a much bigger risk. At the same time, we’d be seen by more people in a big city.

  After another night of being groped on what passed for a stage, I’d had enough and was willing to find out what the unknown was like. And I remembered a saying my grandma used to have—something about how the unknown doesn’t stay that way long once you tackle it. So that’s what I’d have to do. Tackle Boston.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Adrienne

  At first I didn’t like Boston. The roads were fucked up, a lot of one-way streets. I was lost all the time. The guys in the band said we didn’t need cars in the city. But I’d loaded up the Camaro anyway, and when we got there, I vowed to learn my way around. Boston drivers were so aggressive, whenever a turn lane appeared it was like a bunch of rodents scrambling to get the last scrap of food. The rush of cars down narrow streets was amazing, not only because of the drivers’ fierceness, but because no one was killed every single day. Added to that were aggressive pedestrians who weaved in and out of cars and shot fingers at drivers who didn’t see them even though they were jaywalking! The last time I drove in the city, I almost ran over a bicyclist on a cloudy day. He was a wisp of flickering silver, blending into the background so easily, slipping in between bumpers of congested traffic. When the light turned green, I lurched forward and the guy came within an inch of his life, flipping me off, as though it was my fault for not seeing him!

  “Fuck you!” I shouted. “Learn the rules of biking on the road, dumbass!” My Southern no-nonsense girl exploded behind the wheel.

  That was the moment when I decided to hang up my car keys while I lived in the city. I kept my car in a parking garage most of the time I lived there.

  I found a studio apartment on Beacon Street that I shared with two yuppie chicks—Ursula and Peggy. Ursula had a short blond bob and an always-cheerful attitude, and she not-so-secretly worshipped me. Peggy was kind of a pill—a brunette with a chip on her shoulder, who resented the fact that I didn’t toil at a desk like her all day. She softened a little over time, especially when I eventually did have to toil at a desk. But she was usually prickly toward me.

  The people in Boston were nice. After a while, I found we weren’t that different. They got drunk the same way in bars. They had the same romantic dramas and bullshit relationships. What was different was that most of the places where we played had real stages. That was cool.

  We started out playing at just one place, The Oyster Tavern, where the man I’d met in Northport worked. He was the manager. It was mostly a restaurant, but one-half of it was a lounge. Located in a medieval-looking building with stone walls and uneven floorboards, the tavern was an odd place to play. There was a small stage in the corner, and we could barely fit all of us and our equipment there. But we played there every other night during happy hour and late at night on weekends.

  * * *

  When I wasn’t playing my guitar, I was counting out bills in a bank for rich people who could afford to live in the city. The cost of the parking garage nearby was almost as much as my rent so I walked there every day—rain, snow or shine.

  My long walks to work in the mornings gave me a certain peace. Before agitated traffic could mount its full assault on the city each day, there was an almost quietness. Maybe it was only in my head. But in the quiet, the raging thoughts inside my mind would lie still for a few moments. Bills to pay, a pie-in-the-sky career and the girl back in Georgia. Thoughts of Robin lurked around every block, in the shadows of buildings, always there, like a tune I’d never get out of my head.

  “Hey,” I said tiredly to my co-workers, setting down my thermos of coffee.

  This was followed by a collective murmur.

  I took my seat beside Karen Arlington, the never-changing teller. She dressed like my mother used to, and she had reddish hair styled in that short sweep up the back that made you look over forty. She probably was a lot older, but her skin was pale and flawless like cream cheese. During slow periods I’d glance over at Karen and wonder if she had been cryogenically frozen, then thawed out a short while ago. She always seemed surprised at the world. Looking back, I’m guessing Botox was her fountain of youth. That would account for her permanently startled expression.

  Karen, like the rest of the bank, was pretty dull. She dressed in shades of beige and blended into the walls. Every day I swore that wasn’t going to happen to me. I’d made a pact with myself, a countdown of five years max, when I had to make it or forever become one of the Beige People.

  Don’t get me wrong. The Beige People were nice. But every day they talked about the same things—their husbands, boyfriends, and their kids’ precious little habits—how Johnny nearly set the drapes on fire or Susie tried to swallow cat litter. More importantly, what brands of shoes they were considering buying. These were all subjects I couldn’t have less interest in. First of all, none of us at the bank made enough to buy new pairs of shoes. I favored boots anyway, so I couldn’t relate. After a night of smoking weed, trying to avoid being pawed by a pimp or just a guy who looked like one and later dancing with a hilarious drag queen named Bella Donna, I could give a shit if tuna was on sale. I’d look around and wonder what Bella Donna would’ve thought of these people.

  I was living two lives. The night life was taking over me, as if I were a werewolf who started to prefer the full moon side of my nature. Wild Me was getting harder to contain in the boring, repressive bank atmosphere. In my raspy, morning voice I’d sometimes make sharp remarks about their conversations that amused no one but myself.

  I wasn’t there to make friends with the Beige People. I was there to do a job, get paid and go home. Sometimes I wished for some real female friends, but we had nothing in common. The worst thing about the Beige People was that they had no aspirations—or if they did, they didn’t talk about them. They lived only in the present, and when they did talk about the future, it was only their concern about how to serve the ribeye at night.

  “Does your husband have two hands?” I’d ask.

  Karen would crinkle her nose and say gently, “I do the dinners in our house.”

  It took me a while to realize this was a source of pride
to her. I’d never met a real-life woman who cooked for a man because she really wanted to. But hey, if that’s what got Karen jazzed, good for her. It was kind of fascinating to me.

  “Did you sign Paul’s card?” Karen asked me in the break room in the back.

  I’d come in to refill my coffee and hoped to be left alone at least until I’d had enough caffeine in me to be able to tolerate anyone.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Paul,” she replied, annoyed. “It’s his birthday.”

  “Good for him.” I started to leave. Not even coffee was worth this conversation.

  Karen grabbed the card from Julie, who had just finished dotting her “I” with a heart. She nodded a “thank you” to Julie and thrust the card at me. “Sign it,” she commanded.

  I took it and scratched a few lines like a doctor’s signature. I’d been practicing signing autographs quickly, so it looked like a couple of letters, three max. I handed it back to her.

  She examined it. “Really?”

  “Oh, are you grading it? I flunked handwriting in school.” With that I returned to the floor. The doors were opening soon. I don’t think she ever got my sense of humor or appreciated it.

  The next morning, I came in as usual, took off my leather jacket, hung it on the back of my chair and set my coffee down, vowing not to return to the break room. I tried to orient myself to the daytime, but my eyes were still bloodshot and squinty. Shortly thereafter, Karen’s promotion to bank manager was announced. There was a big sheet cake in the break room to commemorate her achievement. Damn. I couldn’t avoid that stupid room. I stood beside the table, holding a paper cone cup of water to be social, but the sight of another cake coming so soon after Paul’s the day before, and carrot no less, before eight in the morning, made me want to throw up.

  “I’d like to talk to you about your jacket,” Karen said quietly as soon as she could corner me. Apparently my leather jacket had bothered her for some time, but she didn’t have the power to do anything about it—until now. “I’d like you to wear more professional-looking attire.”

  “Excuse me?” I knew I intimidated her, and I was going to make it as hard on her as possible.

  “You know,” she said with apparent difficulty, forcing a smile. “It doesn’t have to be long, but some other fabric. Wool perhaps.”

  I stared at her, expressionless. It was High Noon and I didn’t want to back down. Wasn’t it enough that I wore khaki pants instead of jeans and that I’d bought a whole bunch of “work” shirts that I’d never be caught dead in outside of this place?

  “Fine.” I crushed my cone cup, letting the water drip onto the Berber rug, which had loops of fiber wound as tightly as whatever Karen had up her ass.

  A week later, the Oklahoma City bombing happened. All over the news they were trying to figure out if it was a lone attack or if there was going to be a series of attacks. Since our bank just happened to be in a federal building like the one that was blown up and across from a YMCA like the one that was blown up, my nerves were shot when security guards burst in the next day and told us to evacuate the building. All at once I pictured the hollowed-out building in Oklahoma City, its insides spilled out, looking like one of those buildings in war-torn countries in the Middle East.

  “There’s been a bomb threat,” a security woman informed us.

  We were on the fifth floor. Everyone began to file out, calmly taking the stairs instead of the elevator. Knowing it was cold and windy outside, I put on my black wool blazer, which had my keys and wallet in the pockets, just in case.

  We stood outside for nearly an hour as a SWAT team searched the building with bomb-sniffing dogs. Everyone was pretty rattled since the bombing happened the day before.

  “I don’t think they’ll find anything,” Karen said reassuringly.

  My jaw was clenched in the cold.

  Laney, another teller about my age, slapped me playfully on the shoulder. “Your thin Florida blood not taking the cold very well, huh?”

  “Yeah.” I was getting tired of that joke.

  Pat, a rotund woman who always wore turtlenecks, came over to me. “What’re ya gonna do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I watched as Karen talked to a member of the SWAT team. She kept nodding.

  “My husband works across the street.” Pat pointed out the building. “I could go there for a bit and come back.”

  “Sure.” I rubbed my arms to keep warm.

  “I’m scared,” she told me. “About going back in.”

  I nodded. I knew why she was nervous. It was looking as though they couldn’t find anything. Soon they’d be wrapping up the investigation and telling us everything was fine and not to worry. Authority figures were always there to make you question your gut. Things you’d never consider doing, all of a sudden you think about doing because someone in a suit tells you to. That was Pat’s struggle, probably everyone else’s struggle in the bank. I swore to myself I wasn’t going to stop listening to my own gut.

  Sure enough, almost a minute later, Karen shouted authoritatively, “Everyone come back inside! I have an announcement.”

  “Did they find anything?” Laney asked.

  Karen was evasive, instructing everyone to follow her with hand signals.

  Employees from other companies in the building were also being herded back inside, while some were clearly not comfortable, hesitating, but eventually following the others inside. I overheard someone say, “They can’t find anything. Doesn’t mean there isn’t one in there.”

  “Hell with this,” I said, turning away from the building.

  “Where are you going?” Pat asked with alarm.

  “Home,” I answered. “I don’t need to get blown up to find out if there’s a fucking bomb.”

  I suppose I always had a problem with authority. But that day I felt pretty justified since it was about my life.

  Hearing later on the news that the building had been deemed safe, I went in to work the next day.

  Karen was not pleased with me. I got an icy reception from everyone, and Karen commanded me with her finger to come into her office.

  “Hey,” I said. “How did it go yesterday?”

  “Please sit down,” she said. “If you had chosen to stick around, you would have known that I held a meeting and told anyone who wasn’t comfortable that they could leave early.”

  I tried hard to control any hint of smugness, but I’d been told by several people that I had a pretty expressive face.

  “Okay,” I began, “so you’re saying I could’ve left as long as I went back into a building where there may or may not have been a bomb, as long as I let you tell me I could leave?”

  “Exactly.”

  She failed to see the ridiculousness, or she was simply annoyed by my insubordination.

  “It may not always make sense to you,” she said tightly, “but if you can’t follow instructions…there would be anarchy.”

  “What is it, Karen?” I tried to talk to her like she was just a person, not management. “You’re really big on rules.”

  “A company cannot function without them.” Her lips were getting whiter.

  “Were you raised by Nazis? Is that it?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Of course I had to leave. Since I’d gotten fired, I’d have a small severance for a month or two. I took a long walk home, stopping by a coffee shop. I tried to figure out why I was so loose with my mouth. It was as if I wanted to get fired. I sat in the nearly empty coffee shop by a window, realizing that most well-behaved people my age were at work right now. With gloved hands I raised my cup for a sip, wondering if it was my dad’s fault, this problem I had with authority. By the end of the cup, I didn’t care what the reason was. I was an adult now, and memories of the past didn’t matter.

  * * *

  “You got fired!” Peggy was going to be Karen Number Two, scolding me for being a jerk to my boss. “You can’t just do whatever you want. That’s not the way the
world works!”

  “I think you did a brave thing,” Ursula said. “It takes guts to tell them their rules don’t make any sense.”

  Peggy was making dinner, slamming each cabinet door extra loudly. “Rules don’t have to make sense! How are you going to pay rent now?”

  “Keep your pants on,” I said, sinking down into the couch I hoped wouldn’t get repossessed. “I’ll get another job.”

  “And who are you going to use as a reference?” she demanded. “When you leave that way, you burn bridges. I’ll bet there’s not one person at the bank who can vouch for you, is there?”

  I was quiet.

  “Jesus!” Peggy thundered, beating the hell out of the tomato sauce lid. When it popped open, she twisted it off and poured the whole jar into the pan. For someone who liked to measure everything, I could tell she wasn’t really paying attention.

  “It’s okay,” Ursula said, reaching out to pat my leg. “I’ll vouch for you.”

  “I’ll list my friend Jerry as my last supervisor,” I said.

  Peggy swung around, peering over the small kitchen bar. “Oh, so you just commit fraud. That’s really nice!”

  “You know,” I said. “If I’d been blown to bits, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “No,” she retorted. “Instead, I’d have your stereo and much lower blood pressure!” She stormed out and went into the bathroom and slammed the door.

  “Did she just say she wishes I were dead?” I asked Ursula.

  “She’s…uptight.” Ursula’s big blue eyes were fixed on me adoringly.

  I’ll admit it was a very expensive apartment, and I was a little anxious as to what job I’d find. But I wasn’t going to let Peggy know that. I realized that Ursula was still gazing at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “You’re just so cool,” she said. “You’re not like anyone I know.”

  I recognized that look. The acid in my stomach rushed to my throat.

  “You’re straight,” I reminded her. And I wasn’t attracted to her.

  “I know,” she said, “but I’ve always wondered…”