Authors: Mary Wallace
He was wearing a black t-shirt and his usual
washed-out camouflage pants with tennis shoes.
He had stopped wearing his camel colored hiking boots, she
noticed.
He’d come through the double doors a few times
over the last few months, hovering at the back wall, cocking his head left and
right, waiting until there were very few people in the lobby.
He stood until her line lightened and
she’d fidget, keeping her eyes either downward or fixed on the hapless customer
in front of her, engaging them more than usual, stalling, ‘What about your
cable, do you still have cable?, challenging them about other bills that they’d
put first.
He was still there, only four paces from her
window when she looked above old Mrs. Tensin’s head.
He was staring right at her, a glint in his eye, a shy grin
on his face, bright white teeth.
She wondered how he could be so well kept and yet need to beg to have
his monthly cell phone bill extended, month in and month out.
Sure, good-looking men came in
occasionally.
Frank would tap his
pocketknife on the counter three times real fast when one walked in, and he’d
time his customer interactions like a Swiss watch to be the available teller
when the handsome gay man hit the front of the line.
If he’d only work as hard for the little old ladies, Jeannie
joked, he’d have the desserts that the elder customers brought to her to sway
her to waive fees.
But Frank
didn’t want chocolate ginger cookies in a bag wedged into the payment
drawer.
He wanted a date.
And he was usually on target.
Sometimes the customer was at the
employee entrance to pick him up at the end of the workday.
Celeste always left work alone.
A quick stop at the grocery store on the
way home, a few cocktails while she made dinner, then she’d either go out to a
bar to listen to jazz or she’d stay in, clipping home interior photos from Coastal
home magazines or reading her tropical romance novels until the words became
blurry and the bottle was too hard to pour.
But this guy.
She knew he was flirting, in the way he quietly tapped on
the glass right near her face, the way he awkwardly smoothed in towards the
squawk box and lowered his voice, not out of shame but to force her closer to
hear him.
His tentative ‘darlin’s,
his preposterous stories, she’d blush, sputter a little, doodle on the deposit
slip he couldn’t see.
She’d take
his cash through the little hole and then tap on the keyboard, bypassing the
overdue fees and restoral charges.
He must have known he had her, and to seal the deal, he’d put one hand
up on the glass, cajoling her to put hers up too for a high five.
He wouldn’t leave until she’d do it,
and she could always feel Frank staring at her, his eyebrows raised with a
smirk, so she’d raise her hand and slap the glass quickly, then shuffle her
papers and yell, ‘Next!’
He stood at the window, finally.
Her heart raced and she stared at his
right ear, it stuck out a bit from his brown, wavy hair.
“Hi, Sugar.’
“Hey, Eddie.”
He pushed several twenties through the hole,
“Didn’t get my bill last month.”
She felt her lips go numb, her eyes sneaking
full frontal peeks at his freckled cheekbones; they had the dusky burn of too
much sun.
She tapped on her
keyboard, embarrassed.
“What’s the
phone number?”
“Well, if you’d ever call me, you’d know.”
He stood there nervously, still holding
the ends of the $20 bills.
“I don’t remember, sorry, Eddie.”
He rattled off his number and she entered it
into the computer.
The screen lit
up and she read the prompts.
She read
the ‘Paid To’ date, it was 57 days ago.
“You’re looking good.”
He leaned into the window and pointed,
“Your hair is getting longer.”
Eddie wasn’t handsome in an angular way, he
wasn’t good looking in a way that made you snap your head in surprise as you
tried to get a second and third unobtrusive glimpse.
But he did have the endearing soft facial features of the
friendly kid who’d swung next to you on the playground structure in third
grade.
He had an unarchitectural
face, with flush cheeks, light brown eyebrows, gray blue eyes, a nose that was
straight with a ski jump at the end of it.
But his lips.
They looked infinitely kissable, she thought, pillows that stretched
from the middle of one cheek to the other, and as much as he tried to coax her
out of her uncharacteristic silence, she wanted to coax a warm smile out of
those lips, to see those eyes light up.
He didn’t smile often though.
Frank was right.
He looked like an old-movie cold war
spy who thought the enemy was everywhere.
His half grin melted her, but it was always taut with an unspoken worry
about something she could not see, some memory playing in the back of his mind
that kept the grin from settling in.
The heaviness of his inner life locked his facial features, as though a
little boy, full of his life joy, had had his greatest dreams stomped into a
thousand shards.
There was a
terrible sense, Frank said, that Eddie had been disconnected from any sense
that he was safe.
Frank, who had the experience of many short
term relationships, had months ago blocked Celeste from her initial instinct,
which was to jump into Eddie’s life with the intent to surround him with
thoughtfulness, stability, kindness.
Safety.
“I do see how he comes in here, probably more
to practice getting along with people and to see you than to actually keep his
phone going,” Frank said, but he always repeated his mantra, “You can’t fix
someone, you can only fix yourself.”
So time passed with intermittent moments
within which Eddie stood on the other side of the glass, his boyish face
scanning the office in jittery bursts of movement until he faced her.
His glistening eyes would soften, his
lips would part and embarrassment hijacked the gray in his cheeks, flooding
them with rosy warmth.
Emboldened by her similarly interested
nervousness, he’d come out of his war-shocked shell.
His eyes focused on her and Celeste felt, for the first time
in her life, seen, deeply seen by a man.
The flirting used to be subtle, airy.
He’d lean in and tell her he’d take her
out to dinner on the fees she waived for him, but the teasing always stopped
short of an actual date.
It felt
like he couldn’t yet cross some unseen emotional barrier to let her be close,
that he needed the glass barrier as a protection.
Then more time passed between his visits, so
much time that she couldn’t easily waive fees and she stopped turning the
screen so he could see it.
He was
losing his manly heft, his face was hollowing out and he didn’t walk in with
the same primal hunting skills he once used.
He seemed haunted now.
Part of her sometimes wished Frank would take
him, but the flirting still aroused her and whenever he walked in the double
doors, she shifted forward in her seat, speeding up all her customers until the
heated moment that he sidled up in front of her and spoke with his amber
gravelly voice, and, like today, she’d touch the money he placed in front of
her and for a moment they were almost in physical contact and he’d tug the
bills back towards himself, her heart would leap into her throat and he’d stare
at her, she’d focus on the cloudy blue of his eyes, the raised eyebrows above
and, finally, his tentative laugh would break the moment, he’d let go of the
bills, tap on the counter between them, put his hand up for the high five that she
was now prepared for, tell her ‘Keep my number and call this time”, and saunter
out the double doors, his hair glinting in the sunlight, like rays on the dark
Detroit river on too-sunny days.
Moments would pass before she felt the
presence of another customer and she’d tear her eyes from the outside doors to
look down at the bills in her hands.
She counted the $20 bills and rang in his payment, waiving the
reinstatement fees, hitting the ‘special circumstances’ key that bypassed the
need for a supervisor’s approval.
Always, always it seemed that right behind him
stood a mother with obnoxious fighting kids.
A brat would whine, the mother would lift the worst offender
up onto the counter, putting the dirty diaper up against the plexiglas and
Celeste would wave her hands angrily, ‘Kid OFF, no kids on the counter!” until
the mother would pull the toddler to her hip, torn between glaring at Celeste,
hushing her now-sobbing child and the need to get her damn phone back on.
Frank would laugh from his desk a few feet
away, and Celeste would huff until the warmth of her hand from his plexiglas
connection was gone.
Back to
counting piles of small bills, playing God with penalties and restoral fees
until the line lightened and she could daydream about a life she’d never had
but could slip into for five minutes, with warm air, tropical breezes blowing
through the open windows of a shingled home, the view of moonlight over an
ocean and the love of a good, strong man.
Later, she’d sneak with Frank to the sides of
City Hall, knowing that the perimeter was unguarded by beat cops that had been
laid off years ago.
She’d pull out
her new larger stencil, unfold it and use the platinum spray paint she’d found
in an abandoned auto manufacturing plant she’d skulked through with Frank.
She’d spray paint the logo of the
betraying car company that off-shored jobs for the electric car, and then pull
out her red can of paint and spray paint blood droplets over the HOPE stencil,
the stencil that had made her an underground icon, the voice of faith in a
broken down, beaten place.
Time to
say that it was nearly over for her beloved home city.
Detroit was bled too much; the leeches
had been left on too long like medieval medicine she’d learned about in middle
school history class.
The electric
car was just the very last symbol of hope for Detroit, for workers crushed by
management, for management crushed by bankers.
She would spray as many of the symbol onto the
outside walls as she could without being seen.
Frank would stand at the corner under the flickering streetlight
that had almost been turned off when Detroit threatened to declare bankruptcy
during the summer.
In the autumn
early evening darkness, there would be no activity on the streets anyway.
The city was that far gone.
Chapter
Eight
Celeste unlocked the upper lock then put the
key into the door lock and pushed the door open over the crusty shag
carpeting.
The landlord had
promised in year one that he’d replace the beige shag, but he avoided her
during the winter months when the weather stripping failed and the snow and
salt drifted into her ground floor doorstep from the boulevard around the
corner.
She reached down for her mail, four interior
design magazines with photos of welcoming living rooms on their covers.
She piled them in order of what she
liked, the warm shoreline cottages on top, the coastal houses in the middle,
the tropical condos on the bottom.
She unpacked the paint cans and stencils and
tucked them behind her raincoat in the front closet.
In her bedroom, she carefully pulled the new
lingerie from the bag she’d brought from the store, hanging her new clothes
gingerly on hangers that had easily shirked their elder squatters, including
the heavy navy sweater Frank had delighted in removing.
Her closet had gone from a monochrome
of night colors to a vibrant bouquet of jewel tones, from worn down fabrics to
new sheens that made it look lit from within.
She half closed her closet door, noticing that it still
shone as though it was Aladdin’s cave, with the glint of the hidden treasures
still visible from around the corner.
Back in the kitchen, she dropped her purse on
the small dinette table and pulled limes from the canvas sack on the counter,
cutting them in half, squeezing their juice into a small mug with a photo
transfer of a beach with a palm tree on it.
She cracked open the new dark rum bottle and poured; the
amber alcohol dulled the lime’s tartness.
A few ounces of light rum, then Triple Sec and Grenadine and her Mai Tai
was complete, the tangiest tropical cocktail she could remember from the days
when her mother was bright and vibrant and fixed herself her one drink on
Sunday after church services.