by Brian Bakos
9. Drive Through Memory Lane
Laila slumped behind the wheel of her big luxury car, stunned and distraught. She was in the parking lot of a convenience store with no clear idea of how she’d got there. A cheap, throwaway lighter and a pack of cigarettes were in her hands. She’d apparently just purchased them, though she couldn’t remember the transaction.
She ripped open the pack and lit a cigarette. She inhaled deeply, then coughed out the poisonous smoke. She examined the fiery tip of the killer.
“It’s been eleven years since I had one of these,” she said aloud.
She brutally crushed out the cigarette in the ashtray.
“And eleven years with him!”
She started the engine and lowered the window so as to expel the toxic miasma. She began driving toward the parking lot exit, but she was distracted by her churning emotions and was going too fast. As she started pulling out into traffic, a car honked and swerved out of her way. She slammed on the brakes in time to avoid getting hit.
“Hey, watch it lady!” somebody shouted back at her.
Laila covered her face with both hands and wept.
Nobody else wanted to leave the parking lot, fortunately, so Laila had some time to regain her composure. When she finally pulled out again, there was plenty of room for her in the traffic stream.
She drove through the commercial area in medium-heavy traffic. Turbulent thoughts roiled through her mind, but she managed to reserve an adequate portion of her attention for the road. At the first red light, she glanced at the cars surrounding her. All the other drivers and passengers seemed to be happy – chatting with each other, smiling and relaxed. One car held a contented looking young family with a baby in back.
Laila was alone in a pocket of misery.
Traffic started moving again; more pavement slipped under the big magnum wheels. At the next stop light, an old beat-up car pulled into the left turn lane alongside Laila. Its brakes squealed and its exhaust pipe spewed pollution. Laila jabbed a button on the climate control cluster to recirculate the interior air.
She glanced over at the junker car. A shabby young woman was driving it; her hair looked greasy, and the expression on her face was tense and hopeless. Laila flinched, her eyes widening in alarm. The left turn arrow became green, and the beat-up car limped off. With trembling fingers, Laila pushed the button to circulate outside air; then she lit a fresh cigarette.
Her left hand squeezed the steering wheel – wedding ring, cigarette between index and middle fingers, immaculate manicure. The hand tightened its hold into a death grip. In her mind, she journeyed back to the most painful and traumatic period of her life ....
$$$
.... Beginning with that terrible day in her apartment bedroom eleven and a half years ago. She wasn’t grasping a steering wheel in her left hand that day, but a glass of cheap booze. She did hold a lit cigarette in her fingers, but there was no immaculate manicure; her nails were all bitten down.
In her right hand, she clutched the divorce summons that Keith had thoughtfully left on her vanity table when he’d walked out in the wee hours that morning. She could scarcely see the writing on it through the tears rolling from her eyes. The mirror before her reflected utter devastation.
A framed picture of a handsome, bearded young man stood off to the side. He was smiling, but his eyes held an arrogant cruelty that Laila had never dared to acknowledge before. She brought the cigarette to her lips and dragged deeply, coughed.
“Damn you!”
She flung away the divorce papers; they fluttered across the room like some big, deadly moth. Then she grabbed the framed picture and hurled it against the wall. It smashed into a crystalline shower. A bit of glass flew back, striking Laila’s face.
“Oh!”
She moved a hand to her face, beside her right eye. When she brought her fingers down again, they had blood on them. She studied the small but deep laceration in the mirror, then clutched a handkerchief to the wound.
The bedroom sprawled around her like a tomb. The bed was empty and grim, devoid of any echoing act of love. The sliding door to the closet gaped open. Half of the closet was filled with Laila’s clothes, the other half was empty. Keith had stripped it bare right under her nose. She’d drunk herself to sleep last night waiting for him to return from his latest tryst, and he could have probably set off a bomb without waking her.
Laila stood up. Her motions were stiff and slow, as if she had aged drastically in a single morning. She walked to the abandoned living room and glanced mournfully around. Her large potted plant was tipped over with some of its dirt spread along the carpet. The front door stood ajar. A cat poked its head inside, glimpsed Laila, and quickly retreated.
then ...
The nightmare continued later that morning at the bank where they’d had their accounts. Laila sat in the trim, glass-topped cubicle of the bank officer hoping against hope that she still had some funds. She wore a band aide on her facial cut and a sweatshirt sporting a logo from some university she had not attended – she’d never gone beyond high school.
The bank officer was very prim and neat in an immaculate suit, clearly a young man on the way up. The bright, smiling face of his wife beamed from a framed picture on his desk, in marked contrast to Laila’s crestfallen demeanor.
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Frost,” the bank officer said, “but these were joint accounts. Your husband zeroed them out.”
He examined a sheet of paper impassively.
“Your credit card has been canceled, too,” he said.
Laila shrank deeper into her chair. The black vinyl felt cold and clammy against her skin.
“Perhaps you’d like to open new accounts – in your own name?” the bank officer said.
“No ... thank you,” Laila said.
She rose to leave. The bank officer looked up at her from his comfortable chair, not unsympathetically, then he went back to the other work on his desk.
“Poor lady,” she heard him mutter as she walked away.
then ...
The rent check bounced, of course, and an eviction notice soon arrived. Laila registered at the state jobs program and interviewed with a counselor.
The employment counselor was a harassed, though not uncaring individual with a pile of stale papers lying on her desk. Laila gazed across it with a hopeful look on her face, contradicted somewhat by the sadness in her eyes.
The counselor gave a kind little smile and shook her head; she got to her feet.
“I wish I had better news for you, Laila,” she said. “Check in again to see if anything’s come up.”
“All right, thank you for your help,” Laila said.
She stood up and left. Another applicant quickly took her place.
then ...
The next humiliation occurred at the downtown pawn shop where Laila went to cash in her wedding ring and a few other trinkets. An indifferent broker, late middle-aged and weary with the world, faced her from the other side of the barred window.
He shoved some cash at her over the little curved shelf.
“Is this all?” Laila said with disbelief.
“Take it or leave it, lady,” the broker said. “The price of gold is down these days, and, frankly, this ain’t the best quality stuff.”
“I’ll ... take it.”
The broker gestured to someone standing behind Laila.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have another customer.”
Laila turned away hesitantly, attempted a brave smile; then she left the building.
When she’d arrived at the pawn shop, there had still been some time on the parking meter out front, but now it was all used up. A parking ticket festooned the cracked windshield of Laila’s battered old car.
“Oh, no!”
She grabbed the ticket from under the wiper and stared at it with anguish; a tear moved down one eye. A bag lady shuffled past, looking quizzically at her, then moved off to poke through a trash bin. A female ticketing officer was
two cars away placing another ticket. Laila dashed over to her.
“But I was only in there a minute!” she cried.
The ticket officer looked at her, bored and impatient. She’d heard every excuse before.
“Must have been a minute too long,” the ticket officer said. “Better get that windshield fixed, before the cops give you another ticket.”
and finally ...
No one wanted to buy Laila’s cheap furniture, no matter how far she marked down the price, so she was forced to abandon it at the apartment when the eviction men came.
She stopped her car in front of the apartment building, motivated by some strange curiosity to observe the final act of the disaster her marriage had brought. The front brakes ground, badly in need of repair, and the decaying exhaust system rumbled ominously. The back seat overflowed with boxes and a suitcase; the big potted plant was belted into the front seat like some alien passenger. Keith had magnanimously left her this battered yellow vehicle when he’d driven off in his new Chevy truck.
She watched the workmen, supervised by a sheriff’s deputy, hauling her miserable furnishings out to the curb – including the vanity with its now cracked mirror. The deputy looked directly at her, his face cool and official looking. A neighbor lady observed Laila sadly from her front step. She started to wave, but stopped herself so as not to add to the young woman’s humiliation.
Laila began driving slowly, observing the men from her open window, rotating her head as she passed. She wasn’t watching the road and would not have particularly minded getting hit by a semi-truck, but nothing came her way. Then the corner arrived; she sped up and escaped around it in a belch of exhaust fumes.
$$$
Laila returned from her nightmare trek down memory lane. She was in the big luxury car again, wedged in by a stream of traffic. The little scar beside her right eye throbbed painfully.
“I’m never going back to that,” she said through gritted teeth.
But her words seemed hollow, even before they left her mouth. Never in her life had she felt so weak and vulnerable – like a baby tossed from its crib onto a trash heap.
She was hemmed in by class origin, by lack of formal education, by the stingy prenuptial agreement she’d been compelled to sign. The ruthlessness, knowhow, and sharp lawyers were all on the other side. The genuine love she’d felt for Frank was also being kicked onto that trash heap.
Another stop light halted her progress. The red orb glared down through the windshield like the eye of some brutal god, mocking her helplessness. Laila withered under its gaze, half expecting a death ray to issue from it and pin her to the seat like a bug in a collection.
Then a radical idea popped suddenly into her mind, breathtaking in its audacity. Laila’s expression changed from fear, to surprise, then to nascent triumph.
“Yes, that could be the answer!”
The light turned green. Laila stomped the gas, punching well above the speed limit.
