Talk of the Town (20 page)

The old gas station seemed to be located at the farthest end of the world by the time they got home. Small. Shabby. Off the driven path. A nowhere place that she called home. She wandered restlessly through the garage, eyeing the near-finished but incomplete sculptures that stood in the shadows as the afternoon light began to fade in the windows.

Who was she? she wondered again. Small, shabby, frightened Rose. Living in a hole beside the ocean where no one would find her. Rigidly walking the lines down life's highway to avoid being noticed; to escape the pain of feeling too much; to evade other people's opinions and prejudices.

She was a void, she thought, running her hands across the cool, lifeless steel without feeling it. A good word: void. She had depicted more of herself in these pieces than she realized. They were very much like her. She was a form that occupied space. She had very little spirit, no meaning. Even the motivation for their creation was bogus, and therefore they had no real purpose. If they had a function at all, it was for profit and recognition. Trifling ambitions. Very superficial. They were as empty as she was, just as insincere and just as contrived.

If true art is an extension of the artist's soul, she was one hell of a craftsman.

There was an almost-knock on the office door, a sort of on-the-way-through rapping on the glass as the door opened and Lu blew in.

"Rose?" she called, starting up the stairs, stopping midway when she answered from below. "What are you doing here?"

"I live here."

"No, I mean, so soon. I just got back myself, and I wasn't at a ball last night. I had one, but I wasn't
at
one," she said, laughing at her own joke. "Tell me all about it. How was it? Give me every detail." She stopped. "What's wrong?"

"Me. Everything." As much as she needed someone to hold and comfort her, force of habit had her turning away to hide the extent of her pain. "Me, mostly."

"Why? What happened?"

"I don't know. Well, I do know, but I don't know how to explain it. . . . Actually, I can explain it, but I can't believe I did it."

"So, are you going to tell me what this thing that you know and can explain but don't believe is?"

Rose turned to face her, shaking her head, tears spilling onto her cheeks. "It's too awful. You won't want to know me anymore."

"Tell me anyway."

She lowered her gaze to the concrete floor. She walked slowly to the work table, seeing nothing. She picked up an old glove with a hole in the index finger and began to tell the story.

"And you haven't heard from him?" Lu asked when the tale was told and Rose was down to sniffing and wiping her eyes on her shirttail. "Well, it's only been a day. He's probably pretty mad still."

"I don't expect to ever hear from him again." Fresh tears pooled in her eyes. "Of all the people in the world to be mean and nasty to, why'd I have to pick on him?"

"Did you get my message about the Cannery?" she asked, offering no sympathy.

"Yes."

"I bet you didn't even go over and browse like I told you."

Rose scowled at her. "I was a little busy ruining my life at the time. I couldn't exactly take time out to go shopping, now could I?"

"I said browse. I didn't say anything about shopping. here
is
a difference, you know. And now you'll just have to go back and do it."

"Some other time, all right?" she said, getting testy. For crying out loud. Shopping
and browsing
were the last things she wanted to do. She hated to shop, browsing was worse, and Lu knew it. Couldn't she see that Rose would rather be slitting her throat than
browsing?

"Nope. Gotta go now," she said, ignoring the thorny inflection in Rose's voice. "You can use my car if you don't think your heap’ll make it."

"Lu. I'm not going back to San Francisco tonight. Or any other time in the foreseeable future for that matter. I—"

"Yes you are."

"No. I am not." Now she was angry. "What is the matter with you? Can't you see I'm hurting here? My life—"

"You're
hurting?
Your
life? See, that's the thing with people like us, Rose, it's always
our
pain.
Our
shame.
Our
life that's going down the tubes. We're so used to being hurt that after a while that's all we ever see. But think about it this time. Who hurt you this time?" She paused. "Gary? Or did you hurt yourself by hurting him?"

Her eyes narrowed in thought. "Yes. The second one. I hurt me by hurting him."

"So, technically, you're not really hurt. You just feel bad because you did something stupid. Right?"

"I guess." But miserable was miserable, wasn't it? No matter how you got there?

"Okay. Think it all the way through now. Are you going to do what we usually do by locking yourself up with this imagined pain that's really just guilt for doing something you shouldn't have? Or are you going to do something about it? Are you going to close out the world again, spend your life alone or with a new man in your bed every night? Or are you going to break out of the pattern and go after the man you want?"

Rose wasn't missing the references Lu was making to her own life. She'd always suspected her past hadn't been pleasant, but she'd never thought to draw any comparisons between the two of them until now. In a way she supposed they were opposite ends of the same stick Lu protected herself by dating one malleable young man after another until she was bored with them, never forming an attachment, and Rose survived by pushing everyone away from her to sustain her aloneness.

"Even if I wanted to break this . . . pattern you're talking about, what makes you think that Gary'll come back?"

"I don't think that. If I were Gary, I wouldn't have anything to do with you." She stopped to watch the hope drain from Rose's face. "But then again, I'm not Gary, am I? I can't say I'm sorry and I never learned to forgive—which is why I avoid situations where one or both might become necessary. I find it much easier to simply say good-bye."

Rose's heart went out to her, and to herself. Lu deserved a better life—and so did she.

How was it that Lu knew herself so well and yet hadn't tried to change? Was her pain so deep? Did she enjoy living alone with it? Rose looked at the rest of her life and found it long and bleak and lonely.

"I don't know what to do, Lu."

"Say you're sorry."

"That's it? Just—"

"No, no. Say it. Now. Out loud. Over and over. Practice it. Get used to saying it and to hearing it said out loud. It's not that easy. No one ever told us
they
were sorry, did they?" Rose glanced away and shook her head. "And we were always the ones getting hurt, so we've never had to say it, right? Well, you hurt yourself this time, and the only way you'll ever feel better about it is to make Gary feel better about it. You have to do whatever it takes to get him to forgive you. Now say it."

"What if he doesn't forgive me?"

"Then he doesn't. But you tried, and that's the first step to forgiving yourself. Say it."

"Lu?" she said, a nagging question filling her mouth so that to breathe, she had to spit it out. "If you knew this . . . about us ... all along, why haven't you—?"

"Because I wasn't ready," she said, cutting her off, also slamming the door to any further questions. "But you are, so say it."

"I'm sorry."

"Again."

"I'm sorry."

"Keep going," she said, checking her tight jeans pockets for the right bulge before reaching in for her car keys. Meanwhile Rose chanted. "That's good. Now take my car and drive back down to the Cannery and—"

"But—"

"Yes, I know. You're sorry. You should have gone to the Cannery. You're sorry. Go on. I forgive you for doubting me. And I forgive you for not doing it this morning when I told you to," she said, putting the keys in the palm of her hand and pushing her toward the door. "See how easy it is?"

"But, Lu . . ."

"You don't even have to go into the stores. Just window shop."

"But, Lu ..."

"No. I can't tell you what you’ll see," she said, turning Rose to the door every time she stopped and turned to protest. “You'll know it when you see it, and it'll clear up everything for you. It'll make saying you're sorry a little tougher in some ways, but in other ways it'll make it a whole lot easier."

"But, Lu ..."

"I almost fainted when I saw it. You'll love it."

"Lulu!"

"What?"

She slapped the car keys back into her hand as she spoke firmly and finally.

"I have no idea what you're talking about, but if it'll shut you up, I'll go. First thing tomorrow."

"I can't wait that long."

"You're going to have to. They'll be closed by the time I get there."

"Oh. Right. I forgot. But first thing tomorrow . . ."

"Yes!"

"And then you find Gary and tell him you're . . ."

"Sorry," they said together.

~*~

The limo ride to San Francisco was a hard act for the old gray-green pickup truck to follow. The excitement of that journey was sadly, eclipsed by the lamentable trip home, which made this third run along Highway 101 in less than forty-eight hours something of an exercise in self-control as Rose fought a constant urge to skip the side trip to the Cannery and head straight for the main event, apologizing to Gary.

The night had passed slowly as she accepted and rejected Lu's advice, over and over again. She knew asking Gary for forgiveness was certainly in order, and she wanted it more than anything … except for the ability to turn back time. She would have given anything to put everything back as it was, before she'd made that fateful trip across the ballroom.

But the possibility that her sin was too grievous to be forgiven and that she might have to face Gary's scorn and rejection had been enough to make her want to roll over, bury her head in the pillow, and forget the whole thing. She'd never claimed to be a brave woman.

By the time dawn crawled through her window, she was mentally adjusted. Despite all the nonsense with the Cannery, Lu was right about the importance of saying and hearing the words "I'm sorry." She'd dozed off and dreamt of her life as it might have been if her mother had had the chance and her father had thought just once to tell her they were sorry. She'd loved them. She would have forgiven them anything ... if they had asked.

She was grumbling mad by the time she entered the Cannery. What had been a bleak overcast morning in Redgrove was now a rainy day in San Francisco. She'd found Columbus Street on the map easily enough, but finding it in the city traffic, and in the. rain, was a whole other story. When she finally reached the foot of it and the Cannery was within sight, she couldn't find a parking place. She didn't know why she was there or what she was looking for, and she was wasting a lot of time when she should have and would have been looking for Gary.

A little over an hour later she was ready to choke Lu with her bare hands.

She'd scoured every window, one by one, restaurants included, looking for something, anything, just one single thing to jump out at her and scream, "I'm what you're looking for."

She meandered into a Chicken Delight and bought a lemonade to go. Whatever dress or pair of shoes or book or pen set or porcelain figurine or piece of jewelry Lu had insisted she come to see, was now gone. Her feet were getting tired, and there was nothing in almost the entire shopping mall that had held her interest for more than a second or two.

She might have to come back, she decided, handing the cashier a five dollar bill and waiting for the change. She was a rotten shopper to begin with, and she was so distracted by her eagerness to see Gary and get her apology over with that she probably wasn't browsing as well as she might under other circumstances.

Lu would just have to-understand.

Better yet, Lu could come back with her and show her
exactly
what she wanted her to see, she thought, leaving the Chicken Delight. She'd wasted an entire morning on this hide-and-seek game and she was sick of it.

A kaleidoscope of sparkling multicolored lights from across the way caught in the corner of her eye. Instinctively she glanced at it, started to walk away, then glanced back. Her eyes narrowed for clearer vision. Her brows came together in confusion. Holding the lemonade in one hand and the straw in the other, she approached the twinkling lights slowly, as if they were reeling her in like a fish.

There in a darkened display window, set on a small turntable, under a hidden high-intensity light, was her sculpture. Steel and stained glass designed and welded as uniquely as if she'd given birth to it. She could remember making every inlay, bending each metal rod, brazing every raw edge, sanding, buffing . . . and giving it away to Gary.

There were emotions, both good and bad, stirring inside her, but she couldn't pick one to feel, and she didn't know what to think. She had questions, too, lots of them, the biggest being, what was it doing there?

She stepped back from the window, glancing about for the name of the store.

GARY’S GOURMET GARBAGE.

Well, that answered about half her questions right there. Who else? Was there any other man in the world whose name lent itself so well to the nation's waste— and now its recycled by-products?

The window on the other side of the entrance was artfully crowded with recycled paper products: cups, plates, napkins, bowls, stationery, books, computer paper; gift bags, paper towels, storage boxes. A colorful cardboard mobile of ducklings and chicks hung from the ceiling.

She wandered inside. There were toys, clothes, quilts, chairs, and lamps, all new arid all made of recycled materials. There were small displays for building materials such as insulation, plywood, abrasive paper made of glass for sanding, nails, oils, and cleaners. More displays for playground equipment, fertilizers, a walnut shell concoction for cleaning the bottom of boats and a . . .

"If you can't find it here, we can find it for you," a pleasant young female voice said behind her. "Are you looking for anything in particular?"