Cul-de-Sac
Darkness is falling as you slip the car into park, safe in a cul-de-sac in the suburbs. The engine ticks and tacks dispelling its heat into frosty air. The front seat reclines only halfway no matter how hard you bang your back against it. You slip your feet under the brake pedal to hold yourself steady and sink as deep into the sleeping bag as you can go, covering your head and breathing in the smell of armpit and feet and gasoline.
Cul-de-sac is a French term meaning bottom of the bag—you know that from when you worked as a translator. It also means there’s only one exit, one way out. The way you came in. But for you, for now, you feel cocooned in a concrete arc and you close your eyes, drifting, until the car shakes you awake. Someone is pounding on the hood, the roof, the windows. The passenger side door jolts open and a cold blast of air slaps you hard. A man shouts, “You can’t sleep here!”
Your heart pounds as you start the car. Your fingers tremble on the gear shift. You fight the urge to dry-heave the contents of an empty stomach. A bead of snot dribbles to your upper lip and you taste its salt and shame. The engine makes a ragged rumble, then finally catches. Small stones spit from your tires. One yellow headlight leads the way out, the other is cracked and grey like the ice in the pond where you used to skate as a kid, doing twirls and spins and catching snowflakes on your tongue while the world twisted around with you in the center.
Walmart
You can’t sleep. Here, in the Walmart parking lot, surrounded by hulking dinosaurs. Diesel pushers, RVs and trailers whose propane heaters snarl as you wedge your battered Honda Civic in under a bright halogen light that turns your every move into a shadowed ghost. You are getting an extra blanket out of the trunk when a man with thin grey hair emerges from an RV the size of a Greyhound bus, lit yellow from within. He runs a flashlight over his front bumper to check for scrapes, grumbling loud so you can hear “damn bums in cars.” His wife peers out the half-opened door, backlit by a slick of light that turns her white hair into a crown as if she were Queen Elizabeth herself. You half expect the corgis to run out from behind her housecoat and pink slippers.
The next morning when you emerge from the bathroom at the Walmart, you hear a woman call your name. “Beth? Is that you?”
No, is your first thought. Running away is your second.
“Beth, how are you?” The woman has blocked your exit with an oversized cart crammed so full of juice boxes, Fruit Loops and gallon jugs of milk, you almost cry.
You wipe a dab of toothpaste from the corner of your mouth with the back of your sleeve. There is nothing you can do about your hair. Why did you think cutting it with nail trimmers was ever a good idea?
“Oh, hey, Marianne.” You try to make your voice as light as fresh mint.
“We miss you at work,” she says. “Everyone’s been asking.”
You nod your head, force a closed mouth smile. What can you say to that? Je ne sais quoi.
She follows you out the door and the front wheel of her shopping cart slap-spins as she clatters behind. You fight the urge to wave her away.
“I see you’re still driving that old blue Honda,” she says brightly.
Oh, shit. The car. She’s standing by the car, her eyes taking in the heap of trash that is your life. In the back seat, sweater sleeves dangle out of cardboard boxes like wild insomniacs, cardboard coffee cups are crushed in the middle as if gut-punched, and sad little socks curl up in tight, painful balls.
Couch
You wonder how long Marianne will let you stay on the pull-out in the rec room under the frosty blue gaze of the TV where they are watching curling. Granite rocks spiral along a white sheet of ice, bashing into one another in a target of concentric circles called the house. The house you repeat to yourself. You had one of those once and you had a job. And then one by one all those things disappeared, starting with Jake. You couldn’t sleep and you made too many mistakes and you couldn’t work. And you couldn’t live in that house anymore with the scent of baby powder and Jake’s stuffed bear lying on the floor where it fell the morning you lifted his limp body from his tiny crib and cried all the way to the hospital.
Marianne clicks the TV off and carries her youngest child up to bed.
You can’t sleep here. You know that. ◆
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