A guy named Brian who had a boat and who had been out on the water that morning with the fliers said that going to Ireland wouldn’t be so bad. It was at least on the way. Lindbergh had stopped at Ireland on his way to France, hadn’t he?
I didn’t think he had, but one of the reasons I had started taking yoga was to be less self-centered which in my case meant less of a know-it-all and even though most of the time I still corrected people and pontificated and even in yoga class still wanted the teacher to notice how good I was doing, I didn’t say anything this time.
Brian didn’t have any luggage or any carry-on, which had caused him a lot of trouble at the airport, because not having luggage is a sign that you might be a terrorist. I’d had to surrender my deodorant and shampoo because they were more than three ounces. But Brian had been searched and interviewed. There were so many people there who wanted to go to France that someone finally realized that it was not a plot but something else. Brian said one of the TSA guys was trying to go to France and he explained it, although how it could be explained I don’t know.
I’m sure there were people there who were flying to France for other reasons, like vacations or work, but those of us who were just Going to France seemed to be most of the passengers. We sat around without the usual airport feeling, because it didn’t matter what time we left or got there, about luggage and reservations or connections or schedules. It’s amazing how nice an airport is when you’re not worried.
It’s true that we are free to do whatever we want, even go to France on a whim. We can make any choice we want. We can do anything we want. We just have to not care about consequences.
I didn’t care about consequences, but at about seven, I knew I wasn’t going to France. I didn’t say anything to anyone, not even Brian, who I knew was going. I could tell that several other people weren’t going. We just weren’t. We didn’t have the Going to France look anymore. I stopped at the ticket counter on my way out and explained to them that I wasn’t going and that I didn’t have any luggage so they wouldn’t think since I didn’t get on the plane that there was some terrorist threat. I didn’t want the people like Brian to be delayed. I canceled my ticket, even though it was nonrefundable. Maybe someone else could go. I got in my car and went home.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t go to France, it was just that I wasn’t. Maybe it had worn off. Maybe I had caught a mild case from the fliers, but it hadn’t lasted. I didn’t know. I felt kind of sad. When I got home, I didn’t want to go in my house.
I left my bag in my car and started walking to my mother’s house. My mother lived in the same house she had since I was ten, a little brick ranch. It was a couple of miles away and I had never walked there before because I had to cross several major streets. But that night, I walked. My neighborhood is full of old split-levels and even smaller houses, like mine, which only has two bedrooms and no basement. As I walked farther, I went through a neighborhood full of newer, bigger, two-story homes. One of the houses, which was brick on the bottom half and siding on the top, now had a huge clock in the side of it. The clock was set in a huge wave of metal, shining pink in the setting sun. I went this way to the grocery, and the house had never had a clock in it before. It was big, with an ornate hour and minute hand and no numbers, just an ivory face with a design like ivy down near where the seven would have been. But the siding around the clock had been changed into some substance like porcelain that rose and swirled, organic. Suburbia has always struck me as a little strange, but before it had been a boring, overly sincere falseness, and it was as if that clock was about a different suburbia full of beautiful manmade things, full of artifice.
I thought about my mother’s house, walking through the darkness. When I got there, it would be the end of the day and maybe I’d have a daiquiri or a Manhattan, and maybe my mother would have one with me. I didn’t really know if I wanted a drink, but it was a kind of punctuation on the day.
I was at an intersection; traffic lights, four lanes wide plus turn lanes in all directions, waiting to cross, maybe only half a mile from my mother’s house. A dry cleaner, a drug store, buildings all pressed close to the street without much space between them. A Ford pickup was stopped at the light in one direction. The sky was dark but still glowed purple and luminous the way it will some nights, especially before a tornado. A young unkempt guy with a beard sprinted across the light, and an SUV coming around the corner fast lost it trying to avoid him and went up on two wheels as it started to roll over and everything froze in place. I could see the underside of the SUV, all that car stuff of struts and differentials and muffler and catalytic converter. I looked around. Time wasn’t stopped. The DON’T WALK light was flashing, and although things were frozen, it was imperfect, and after a moment, like the moment of a held breath, the truck floored it and went through the intersection past the frozen tumbling SUV. The guy running had only one foot on the ground, but his raised left foot wiggled back and forth on his ankle, as if he was finding his way to movement. A big orange sneaker, with a big white toe, waggling.
I looked at it all and I knew it was all right. It was only just beginning.
HONEYMOON
I was an aggravated bride. It was a little after one in the morning, I guess. We were supposed to be on our way to the Hampton Inn in Columbus for our wedding night. I was aggravated a lot with Chris, but never this aggravated before. I was walking back toward Lancaster on Route 33, glad that for the reception I had changed into a pair of white canvas sneakers with sequins that my cousin Linda had decorated for the wedding. I knew that I wouldn’t want to wear heels all night. I’m a big girl, and I wasn’t going to miss dancing at my own reception because my feet hurt too bad. But I was still wearing my wedding dress and my veil.
Chris was in his F-150 pickup, driving slow so he could keep asking me to get in the truck. You wouldn’t think there were that many cars on Route 33 at that time of the morning, but there were, and they kept slowing down and carefully passing. Some guy called out the window, “I’ll give you a ride, honey!”
I gave him the finger.
“Please, please get in the truck, Kayla,” Chris said.
I wasn’t talking to him. Usually when I got angry, I started crying, which always loses you any sort of chance you have of making a point. But I was so mad that night, I never even shed a tear.
“I’m sorry. Baby, I’m sorry, I’ll make it up to you,” Chris said.
I couldn’t stand that. “Just how are you going to make it up to me?” I said. “How are you going to give me back my wedding night?”
He looked at me with big puppy eyes and said, “Don’t be like that, Kayla.”
It had been a really nice wedding. I saved the money. My dad’s on disability, so I wasn’t going to ask him for it. I’m an assistant manager at McDonald’s, and I’d taken a second job working for Allwood Florists. All last fall I had made Christmas ornaments—wooden soldiers and Santas and reindeer. I sold them at craft shows. The biggest sellers were dog bone ornaments that I would personalize with the dog’s name. I worked my butt off. Marty at Allwood gave me an employee rate for my wedding flowers; red roses and lilies. I got my dress in Pennsylvania, because if you’re from out of state you don’t have to pay sales tax. I spent a hundred and forty dollars on my hair, having it highlighted. I went to the tanning salon—my dress showed off my shoulders, which are one of my best features. I really did look the best I have ever looked. And the reception went pretty good. A lot of people didn’t stay, but a few people stayed until midnight.
I was really proud of the job I did. Chris had gotten a roofing job for his neighbor in June and said he would put the seven hundred dollars he earned toward our honeymoon. He wanted to take care of it. I gave him the money I had and he said he’d taken care of it. We were going to Cancun even though everyone said it was too hot in August. But I’d never been to another country. So we were supposed to go to Columbus, spend the night, and then catch our flight in the morning.
&nb
sp; Except that while we were on our way to Columbus, Chris told me that he hadn’t actually taken care of it.
“Don’t be mad, Kayla,” he said. “Listen to me first.”
He and Felter and Carnegie had gone up to Windsor in June, right after the roofing job. I knew that. I figured that after we got married he wouldn’t be able to hang out with his friends as much and besides, I was working all the time anyway, paying for the wedding. They were playing blackjack and he won a bunch a money. “Almost six hundred dollars!” he said. “I was gonna use it on our honeymoon. I thought I was on a roll, you know?”
Chris was looking at me. He has really cute blue eyes. Usually I can’t believe that a heavy girl like me got someone like Chris.
“So what happened,” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I know, but you know, I can’t explain it. I wanted to win big. I wanted to get the honeymoon suite, you know? You worked so hard—”
“What happened?” I said.
“I lost the money,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
No honeymoon. He was hoping to put the Hampton Inn on his credit card, but he didn’t know if he’d be able to, because it was kind of close to maxed out. He’d meant to get it paid down, maybe put the whole honeymoon on it, but the alternator went on the truck, and he needed it to get to work.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. I didn’t really believe him. I just couldn’t think about it. It kept squirming around in my head like I understood it, but I didn’t at the same time.
“I didn’t want to ruin the wedding,” he said.
I had worked really hard on the wedding, but I guess I hadn’t thought a whole lot about Chris. I was looking at him, and it occurred to me that the reason Chris was with a girl like me was because he was a fuck-up. I’d just never admitted it to myself.
“Stop the truck,” I said.
I knew I couldn’t walk all the way back to Lancaster, so I finally called Sarah, my best friend and maid of honor. Then I sat down on the berm and waited. Chris pulled the truck off the road and stood, looking awkward. He started to sit down next to me, but I said, “Don’t sit down. That tux is rented and I’m not paying extra if you get it dirty.”
While I was waiting for her, I told Chris I was going to get the marriage annulled.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“It’s like a divorce, only it’s like the wedding never happened,” I said.
“But it did happen,” he said.
“It was never consummated,” I said. I don’t even know where I had heard about that.
He didn’t understand what I meant by that, either.
“We didn’t have sex on our wedding night,” I said.
“We’ve been having sex for two years,” he said.
We had, ever since I was seventeen and in my junior year at high school and he was thinking he would go into the army when he graduated. I figured if I had sex with him, he’d stay. “But we didn’t do it tonight,” I said. “So it doesn’t count.”
I moved to Cleveland, because my cousin Donna lives there. Donna is the opposite of me, physically. She’s short and skinny and has dark brown hair. She has the family boobs, though. She weighs 105 pounds and the joke is that fifty pounds of it is in her chest. She’s in nursing school, and she said I could get a job at the hospital. I never wanted to be a nurse, but she said there were lots of jobs in a hospital, and I could stay with her. I got a job in the kitchen which was fine. The hospital is the Cleveland Clinic, which is probably the world’s biggest hospital. It’s a lot bigger than Lancaster. Not in square miles, but I’d bet more people work at Cleveland Clinic than live in Lancaster, Ohio. It’s really modern. Lots of buildings with green glass. Rich foreigners like Sheiks come there when they’re sick. The kitchens have to make all sorts of food. Diabetic food, low-protein food, low-fat food, Muslim food, Jewish food. It was a lot more interesting than McDonald’s.
I’d never worked with so many black people before. There are black people in Lancaster, but not so many of them. The black people at the Cleveland Clinic, a lot of them were real ghetto. Sometimes if they were talking to each other I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I’d always liked country, for one thing. I didn’t like hip-hop.
Donna was great about me living there, but it was a pain. I thought about going back to Lancaster. In a lot of ways, living in Cleveland wasn’t a whole lot different than living in Lancaster, except it took a lot longer to get to work. My marriage had been annulled. It turned out sex didn’t have anything to do with it.
Chris kept calling me and asking me to come home. I asked if he could take me out on a date. He showed up at Donna’s with a dozen roses and got down on one knee. Then he called collect when he was drunk and cried.
I was talking to my dad one night—I called him every
Tuesday—and complaining about Chris, and my dad said, “Well, Kayla, what did you expect?”
“I expect him to act like a man,” I said.
My dad chuckled and I knew he was thinking that was too much to expect of Chris. It occurred to me that maybe my dad had figured out what Chris was like a long time ago. “Do you like Chris?” I asked.
“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” my dad said. I could just picture him, sitting in the recliner. My dad lives in Chauncy. He used to work for Diamond, before they closed the mill, then he worked at Lancaster Correctional. So I grew up in Lancaster. But when he had to stop working on account of his back, he moved back to Chauncy with my grandmother. Chauncy is about the size of one floor of one building of the Cleveland Clinic. When he said that, I knew he hadn’t ever really thought much of Chris. Although he was always nice enough to him, and they joked around.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
He sighed. I thought he was going to say that he didn’t want to interfere. “I thought you wanted to wear the pants,” he said.
I’ve always wanted a strong man. Or I thought I did. Maybe I thought a pickup truck and talking about the army meant Chris was a strong guy. Or maybe my dad was right. Maybe I wanted to wear the pants.
Maybe I hadn’t really been fair to Chris. But when he called, I would say to myself, Be fair, Kayla. And the sound of his voice would make this feeling rise up in me, like the feeling of teeth scraping together, or like the weird rubbing noise that my car was making. Kind of a clicking noise. It was kind of hard to hear, and so I found myself listening to it and getting more and more tense as I drove to work. That was what talking to Chris was like. I got tenser and tenser while he talked.
My car was sounding like my relationship with Chris, so of course, one day it stopped working altogether. It was the timing belt. It cost me seventy-four dollars to get it towed. Then they told me that it would cost over six hundred to get it fixed, and that I was lucky I was on Euclid and not the highway because if it had been on the highway it might have thrown a rod, and then I might as well just get a new car.
I don’t even know what “throwing a rod” is, but I sort of picture pieces of metal flying through the hood or something. The next time Chris called I told him about it, and for the first time in a long time he perked up. “Yeah, yeah, you could have been in big trouble.”
“I am in big trouble,” I said. “I’m taking the bus to work. The bus is creepy, and it takes forever. It’s going to cost six hundred dollars to get it fixed.” I was trying to save money to get a place of my own and let poor Donna have her apartment back. But I didn’t have six hundred dollars and I was going to have to put it on my credit card. My credit card still had stuff on it from the wedding. Donna was paying for nursing school and only working two days a week at the hospital.
“So are you going to come home?” he asked.
“I’d rather die,” I said.
Donna’s dad, my Uncle Jim, loaned me the money to get my car fixed, and I promised to pay him back, a hundred dollars a month.
One of the girls in the kitchen
told me about medical studies. How she got paid a hundred dollars to take cough medicine every day for two weeks. She told me where to check out the list of studies, and during my dinner break I went about six blocks to the building where she told me. I got lost once—I know how to get to where I park and then to where I work, but the rest of the place is still a maze.
There was a list of stuff, but nothing like the cough medicine study. It was all weird stuff—studies on depression, on taking estrogen. I looked over the whole list and couldn’t find a thing I could qualify for. While I was looking, a guy came up to look, too. He looked healthy. He was a couple of years older than me. Short. Built like he wrestled, if you know what I mean.
He wrote down the info on the psoriasis study.
“What is that?” I asked.
“It’s a skin problem,” he said. “Your skin gets dry and flaky.”
That sounded vaguely possible, although mostly my skin is too oily. “My feet get that way,” I said. “Would that be enough?”
“To be psoriasis?” he said. “Probably not. But you don’t have to have psoriasis to be in the study. They need healthy people for comparison. Tell Lisa you want on the list.”
I did. She asked me about my psoriasis and I told her I didn’t have it. She nodded and put me down. Two weeks later I got called to be in the control group.
And that was my first medical study.
Psoriasis studies are pretty good. I got one hundred and fifty dollars to put cream on and be examined once a week for twelve weeks. Fifty dollars a month toward what I owed Uncle Jim helped a lot.
I got a job in a catering hall as a cook and left the Clinic, but I kept doing medical studies. A study on asthma got me enough to cover the deposit on an apartment. Which was good, because Donna had met Ted, and they were talking marriage, and they sure didn’t need me around the apartment. She graduated from nursing school and one November day, as I walked from the parking garage at the Clinic, I realized that I had lived in Cleveland for three years. The wind cut between the buildings the way it always does. The streets were a mess of slush. I was looking for a study so I could save money for a trip to Cancun in February.
After the Apocalypse Page 13
