Miscellaneous

On Friday morning, Maggie phoned with the seed of a plan.

“I need to bury my pills. I’m thinking someplace rural.”

Jess, who was backing away from a memory like a hiker retreating from a bear, stuck a finger between the waist band of her pants and rubbed the indentations already forming. That morning, her train delayed at the station, she’d seen a homeless man kick the receivers off the telephones, then run away. Her empathy not for the man, but for the plastic molded ear pieces worried her. Sitting at the edge of whatever was coming, she needed to force herself up and away.

Jess slumped in her chair, lowering her head just below the plastic troll doll border patrol positioned around the perimeter of her neighbor’s work station. A drawn out groan came out of the phone. “Stretch louder,” Jess said, then under her breath, cupping the receiver in her hand. “Sharon’s plastic army will think I’m stroking the kitty. Which pills are these? That pack from the university trial?”

Maggie always had some issue with her birth control. One gave her vertigo, another made her feet swell up a full size. An entire weekend in Madison, which included a stolen drum from an Ethiopian restaurant and $500 in parking tickets, was later ascribed to a hormone regulator implant. Jess hadn’t been aware of any problems recently, but evidence wasn’t always a requirement in her best friend’s emotional trials.

“The Estrocese?” Maggie yawned. “No, remember, I dropped those out the drunk trolley on St. Pat’s? These are garden variety. ‘Clears your skin and won’t jack your libido! I know, because I’m a woman doctor.” Those ones. But they’re giving me night terrors like whoa. Got to get rid.”

“Got to get rid”—a trap door trigger for any unwanted element in Maggie’s life. Woe to the man or small furry creature that heard those words. These expulsions meant a ritual needed to be planned, a mild prayer said for lost plans. When the wheels of Maggie’s life train jumped the track, everyone needed to stop and listen to the grate and whistle of steel changing course. She was a part-time nanny and masseuse, professions with normal connotations for Jess, at least until they became the foundations for Maggie’s retro-adolescence.

Jess composed spreadsheets for insurance policy mediators and once threw away a live goldfish. She did not say a prayer when she realized her mistake.

Looking up, she immediately locked eyes with her manager, a dead-eyed MBA with the weight of a luxury sedan lease resting on his narrow shoulders. Simultaneously, he typed furiously on his standing efficiency desk and bored a hole in the wall two inches above Jess’ head. She’d forgotten to get a tardy slip from the transportation desk. Her face warming uncontrollably, she looked down and spied a post-it note sticking out from under her ergonomic wrist pad, unnoticed when she first came in. “Where are you?” she read aloud.

Maggie stopped listing her music choices for the ride. “Alright, alright, I get it. Go. I need to get Kaydon from his breakfast enrichment play date anyway. Do you need any clothes?”

Jess folded the note into an origami bird, but messed up the beak. “No, I’ll just sleep in my underwear.”

“Yeah you will. Or maybe less. Whacca Whacca Whacca. Porno.”


Five minutes past five, Maggie pulled up in her hand-me-down Saab hatch back, a loaner, pumping out the smell of fennel and matted woven fabrics from its owner. Accordion and guitar spilled out of the open passenger side window. Her drunken Medusa curls coiled around her bare shoulders. Kayden, her 8-year old charge loved to draw her. Crayon portraits covered most of the surfaces of her coach house. “I’m kind of squiggly,” she’d shrug, by way of explanation, sweeping a hamster’s nest of paper off her kitchen table.

Maggie dumped two brown bags in Jess’ lap, which contained effortful snacks-- pistachios, seedy crackers and spreads. “You’re on assembly.”

Iowa had been an afterthought. First they chose a highway by the number alone, eventually pulling over to check the traffic report, just in case. They focused on the spontaneity, allowed the planning when it was necessary and inconspicuous.

Sedans and vans pooled behind tollway turnstiles, jostling under floating food courts and keychain depot. Their favorite radio show came on around dusk, and both girls realized they’d never heard it live before, a deadening side effect of so much downloadable information. They laughed together, actively listening to the other for a cue, for a reaction they might have missed on their own. Jess would place a slice of salami on a cracker, spread some anonymous olive dip, perch a shelled pistachio on top, then guide the structure as delicate as blown glass into Maggie’s hand waiting in a pose of supplication.

**

Maggie’s head dropped two times before Jess guided the steering wheel to the Rip Van Winkle motel, a sleeping giant cut out splayed over the entrance in repose. They both took pictures pretending to sleep standing up in front of it.

A pick-up with a camper in the bed was parked kitty-corner from the reception area, the only other vehicle in Van Winkle’s courtyard. Remnants of a barbeque sat in the gravel under its back tires, and an alarmingly fresh-looking smoke stain crept up the two-story building.
“Let’s hope those are unrelated.” Jess imagined them standing over the railing with wire hanger skewers roasting marshmallows in the giant fire pit. The room key was attached to wooden paddle like those brandished by nuns. Maggie grabbed the ice bucket and slapped Jess lazily on her way to the vending machines.

Jess lay on the acrylic floral comforter, making sure not to touch it with her face. She thought about what she had left behind or misremembered or what hadn’t happened at all. The echo of an image that she couldn’t immediately recall, while chopping carrots near the sink: the ca-chunk of the knife against the cutting board, a resonance in her privates and a drugged look of recognition.

The bouncing of flimsy plastic cups, crinkled saran wrap, running water into an ice-filled glass. Maggie held the water within Jess’ opened hand. “Drink me.” She dug around in her bag, pulled out a pill dispenser and swallowed one.

“Are those the pills we’re going to bury tomorrow?” Jess asked, still facing the ceiling.

Maggie crunched one between her molars. “Eh. I’m almost done with the pack.”

They looked out either side of the sliding front window for signs of life. “Do you really want to walk along this road at 11 at night?” one asked the other with her eyes. Maggie stood with her hand on the doorknob for a few moments, but failed to say anything definitive. She kicked off her leather sandals, flopped on the bed with Jess and turned on the TV. Everything played under a layer of dust. The local news drained of color, an old western ran like a historic newsreel.

Maggie was dead sleeper, performing simple unconscious regeneration when needed. Jess tossed and turned. She’d read that she shouldn’t lie in bed and think for more than 20 minutes when trying to fall asleep, that getting up and walking around was better in the long run. She focused on her breathing, batting back the cataloguing and analysis of daily life that tried to sneak in.

Nights before she would try to go to sleep, only to wake up a couple hours later in mid-run, taking solace in half-finished crosswords and DVDs. She lost weekends to unnecessary errands and spent time planning meals. She’d begun to forget small appointments for her boss. She forgot to listen when she turned on the radio in the shower. Her sheets took on the rigid sterility of the hospital bed. Dead set on forgetting this impending memory, she was only successful at amputating components of her present.

Two hours later, at the ledge of the courtyard, Jess eyeballed the persistent lamps above the truck stop. The camper in the parking lot was gone, now just two tracks leading through the gravel until they ended where the road began.

The clear cobalt sky cut down in the distance, cleaving a horizon among distant houses and cows like razor wire. From the gravel shoulder of the elevated road, valleys spilled out, up, and down in perfect ice cream scoops of land.

“I’m going back to nature! I am going to run naked through these fields!” Maggie whipped off her shirt like it was on fire, exposing a generic nude bra with tags cut out. She ran, arms and legs pinwheeling behind her, stumbling down the hill until she rolled, flattening dandelions and tufts of long grass in her wake. Splayed out before a stack of hay bales twisted as perfectly as cinnamon rolls, she breathed exaggeratedly, in through her nose and gasping out of her mouth.

Jess followed, managing a laugh when she came to a stop. “You realize that we’re probably on somebody’s property. A farmer with a shotgun won’t take your Mother Earth word as bond.”

Maggie looked out into the distance, sighed. “You misunderstand the source of my entitlement.” Saying these self-consciously uncharacteristic things, things you’d say at a lectern or in-close up on screen, was her request for silence. True or not, they always had the desired effect.

A jet slowly made its way over their heads, tethered to its own contrail. “Get up,” Maggie said, though she was the one who was down. She walked over to the hay bales, planted her feet shoulder-width apart before them. Silhouetted, a rebellious pear in only sandals and corduroys, the outline of the pill dispenser embossed on the seat of her pants, she contemplated the best means of attack.