One Possible Version

Not sure how I missed seeing her while I was in there shopping, but as I back out of my parking space, there she is: Marita, in a mobility scooter, rolling through the automatic door of Market Basket after surely inviting chaos in every aisle, bumping, jarring, and then apologizing, explaining, and chattering, with such talent you just know she was made that way. I won’t get to see her face until I take a left out of the parking lot, but I know it’s her. 

We’d been housemates, wow, more than thirty years ago. I factcheck that a bit, chew the inside of my cheek as I reach for alternatives and then swallow hard when I’m forced to accept, once again, my current age.  I’m good at multi-tasking so I’m not only performing mental somersaults about my mortality, I’m also following Marita with my eyes while I wait, idling, to turn left out of the Market Basket parking lot. A taxi has blocked the way and a young woman pushing an overloaded shopping cart and holding the hand of a mopey kid, approaches the taxi, opens the trunk and begins unloading the cart, never once letting go of the kid’s hand. Her facial expression doesn’t change. I’ve never seen such skill. That’s courage, I think. That’s tenacity. I flirt with the idea of my own mercifully childless existence with its emphatic tilt toward hedonism, and try to conjure up a little guilt. Nope. Instead, I crane my neck to wink at myself in the rear-view mirror. 

I notice that Marita’s scooter is not one of the store’s loaners and that she’s heading toward the elder housing facility across the street. I’m not surprised to see her using a scooter; when we were housemates, she’d often relied on a cane or a walker or a wheelchair. When I first met her, she probably had a cast on one arm or at least a sling, or one of those big walking boots.  She called herself accident-prone. She fell at work, at church and even down her own soft-carpeted stairs. She talked about these ceaseless injuries with such jovial incoherence, I could barely understand her and didn’t take them seriously. I gave her as little of my attention as I could get away with. Well, that’s who I was back then. 

We weren’t exactly housemates. It was her house, and I rented a bedroom and a little side room and a bathroom, and use of the kitchen. I don’t know how I found the place but I’m glad I did. I was as numb and broken as anyone has a right to be. What I needed desperately right then was a bedroom, a little side room, a bathroom, and the use of a kitchen. 

Two months earlier.

There was so much blood. So much blood that I knew it was serious. He did too. There was so much blood, his impassive face came alive for once – and don’t think I didn’t notice that. He stepped around the shards of glass, got me wrapped up and down the stairs faster than I’d ever known him to do anything. At the landing, the wife of the couple downstairs cracked open her door and looked at me with a depth of concern that made me feel sick with shame. The husband palmed the door shut in front of her face before she could speak. Then we were in the car and racing to the ER. 

There was enough blood to rob me of my typical emotional range, either numb or enraged, and leave me with an unprotected longing, so deep, for something else to be true, not this. And a trust, deeper and wider than every kind of knowledge, that something else was possible. Most certainly possible. 

Blood leaked through the towel he’d wrapped around my arm as we rode to the hospital, his breath coming hard and fast and loud enough to be heard over my sobs. This wasn’t the worst of what we’d done to each other, not by a longshot, but it was the time that forced us into close quarters afterward, buckled into seatbelts, his indifference and my histrionics distilled down to a few drops of blood trickling onto the Corolla’s floormat.  I left him a month or two later. That’s when I moved into Marita's house. I bet I found her place in a newspaper ad.

After the ER doctor stitched me up, she asked if I would like to talk to a counselor and I agreed, not understanding that she meant right then. After a couple of questions from the counselor, I realized the hospital staff saw the wound as a suicide attempt. This was the first I’d heard about this angle. 

Maybe I tried to explain, I was mad. Really mad. I pounded the window with my fist and cut myself on the glass when it broke. 

     Or maybe I said, I slipped near a window and broke the fall with my hand. 

     Or maybe I said, I don’t know what happened. 

     Or maybe I said nothing at all. 

I thought of him in the waiting room, wished he was still breathing hard, but knew he wasn’t.

As soon as I moved into Marita’s house, I bought a new comforter set at Macy’s; big bright florals on a white background, and matching sheets, and set up my bedroom to look as if a normal person lived there. In the beginning, I asked him to come and spend the night with me once in a while. Or always. Definitely not never. He agreed occasionally, maybe to be nice or out of guilt. Or maybe he was protecting his interests. His green card hadn’t come in yet, though it was due soon. We’d been through all the immigration stuff already, had posed for pictures and submitted affectionately worded letters and even had the interview, but getting the card was still conditional upon him being married to a citizen. Me. When he spent the night, we just sleep-snuggled, which was all we’d ever been not-terrible at together, and he always left early in the morning. I sobbed whenever he started to leave and watched as regret mingled darkly with the indifference on his face. 

Living with Marita wasn’t bad as long as I didn’t see her too often and didn’t have to hear too much of the bumbling fumbling apologies and explanations that she offered as conversation.  She worked third shift as a custodian in a nursing home, so I was often alone in the evenings and her house was comfortable. I worked long hours back then - righteous work for economic justice, that felt very important to me. When I came home every day, I just wanted to sit on the couch in my little side room, eat sweet and salty foods, and watch terrible TV until I was numb. I think I felt as alone as I did when I was born, or maybe even conceived, when I was instantly separated from every single thing that had ever mattered. 

I’d left him, which I knew was a smart thing to do, but it felt really stupid when the emptiness crept in a thousand times a day.  I hadn’t had a clue who I was before he showed up, and now, without him, I was 0 for 2. Plus, I was in peace talks with my mother yet again. The only outcome that would satisfy her would be my acceptance of her word as law; she required that I drop all rights to my own sentience. Same old, same old. She’d been trying to get me to sign that treaty since I could hold a Crayola and make an X. 

All this time, I was seeing the therapist that the ER counselor had suggested. She had a stick up her butt and owned multiple jewel-toned skirt suits, and I had to write her a check every week because insurance didn’t pay for therapy back then. Still, she helped me: her puckered mouth tightly served words of judgment and sometimes words of wisdom from where she sat, arms and legs crossed, about six icy paces away from me. I can trash-talk her all I want now, but back then, all I did was try to squeeze a decade or two of healing out of every session, from both pressing emotional, and financial necessity. After each session I’d stiffly write out my check, trek across the office and hand it to her. 

The therapist also encouraged me to meditate. I tried meditating, sitting cross-legged on my floral comforter from Macy’s, and it terrified me. Or I disassociated. Or fell asleep. I tried it some more and it made me feel angry and confused and horny and restless. Or lonely. Once in a while it made me feel quiet, so I kept trying. After all this time, it still makes me feel all these things. Namaste. 

It seems the therapist taught me how to walk away from something that sucks, since I left him after just a few sessions in her office. Then I left her a few months after that, stiffly signing my final check while she stammered, “I don’t like to stop on a dime like this.”

About halfway through the twelve months I live at Marita’s house, she has a more complicated fall at work and is out on disability. Now she lounges in front of the TV in her pastel pajamas and housecoats, smiling sleepily whenever I walk into my little side room - apologizing explaining chattering. I scowl and slink into my bedroom to crawl under the comforter with my journal and scrawl hate notes to the universe, expecting the depth of my rage and sorrow to burrow into the earth, crack its core. The earth remains stable, and I am so pissed off. 

Then the fiscal director of the agency where I work - righteous work for economic justice, that feels very important to me  - runs off with a bunch of money and the executive director cuts all our salaries - already righteously low - by ten percent. This is rocket fuel for my anger, and I walk by the director’s office and through the main lobby more than once a day, sing-songing, another day, another ninety cents. However, after the news hits the local papers, I find Marita dressed and seated at the kitchen table when I get home from work. She tells me – as clearly as I’d ever heard her speak - that she’s lowering my rent by ten percent to make up for the loss in my paycheck. I’m stunned by her generosity, and I wonder, almost against my will, what else might be good in the world. This is a valid enough question that I never stop asking it. 

I hadn’t thought of it this way before, but I wonder if Marita’s kindness was a pivot point, as was that ride to the ER with blood soaking through the towel and onto my jeans. I tend to think about life as moving along in big chunks with clumps of old habits fading into new ones all around the same time. Maybe, though, some discreet incidents move us to change - a non-staccato letting go - and it’s a simple matter of convincing all of yourself to come along. 

I rub my thumb along the crescent shaped scar on my wrist as the young woman loads her final shopping bag into the trunk of the taxi, shuts it firmly, buckles the mopey kid into a seatbelt and then herself into the seat next to him. I’m in awe. The taxi’s brake lights flash off, and I’m free to take a left just in time to see Marita enter the crosswalk on her scooter. She looks both ways and I wave for her to go. I’m surprised to be crying, and also relieved. I send her a silent blessing as she passes in front of me: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I watch her until she rolls onto the opposite curb and enters the courtyard of the elder housing place, apologizing, explaining and chattering to everyone as she passes.

Linda Sanchez is a writer, teacher, alchemist, and entrepreneur. Her short stories, personal essays and flash fiction have appeared in The First Line, Blink-Ink, The Dribble Drabble Review, Six Sentences, and more. Linda lives north of Boston with her husband and two beloved dogs, most often in a state of bliss.