New York City
The diminutive woman, carrying the full weight of her imposing dowager’s hump, slowly, cautiously picked her way across the slick city street still shimmering from the afternoon’s downpour. As she neared the bus stop, she would glance back anxiously at the thin, stick-like shadow of her husband who shuffled behind distractedly.
“What does that sign say over there?” asked the old man when he finally caught up with her.
“That one? It says ‘Right Lane Only to 59th Street Bridge,’” his wife answered spitefully.
“No, Dolores. Not the traffic sign. I mean, does our bus stop here?”
“Yeah, Morgan. This is correct. Don’t worry.”
Dolores was wearing a large-brimmed felt hat. Her steel blue eyes were carefully set off by a touch of red sable-coloured lipstick. Her dewy powdered complexion still bore faint traces of a once attractive youthfulness, but now the corners of her mouth were bracketed in unbecoming hard lines, quotation marks chiselling her every word in cool indelible stone. She was carrying several shopping bags. As the bus arrived, Dolores elbowed her way hastily through the crowd.
“C’mon, Morgan. You’re too slow. Look, the people are all ahead of us!”
“Yeah, coming,” the old man muttered inaudibly.
The couple pressed ahead to the back of the bus and settled themselves as comfortably as possible, squashed together by the other passengers. It was rush hour. The bus was crowded, and traffic moved slowly. Morgan picked up his oversized umbrella and began to fidget with it while his feet nervously tapped a tattoo of disjointed rhythms. He was well dressed in a gray gabardine trench coat and woollen Stetson hat.
“What did you buy in there?” he asked his wife.
“Something for Owen’s birthday. A jogging suit.”
“What’s that? Underpants?” Morgan asked straining his eyes.
“I said jogging suit, not jockey shorts,” she hissed sarcastically, raising her voice while several passengers turned around.
“I hope it fits him,” he said.
The bus rolled ahead slowly in fits and starts as it neared the Queensborough Bridge. Morgan’s feet were tapping relentlessly. Why? she asked herself. I knew I shouldn’t have, she thought. Was it his name—Morgan? Morgan, Morgan. It always reminded her of an undertaker. Should have listened to her gut back then. Ah, too late. She jerked her shoulders several times, sighed heavily and looked away briefly. “Must you always do that?” she snapped testily rolling her eyes. Morgan slapped his legs to steady them. The sudden silence caused the rigid lines around her mouth to relax for a moment. Then the tapping began anew. “You know, we’re going to that party Saturday night,” she said as if to challenge him.
“But there’s a hockey game on television—”
“Did you hear me, Morgan? We’re definitely going to that birthday party. I promised Owen. He is your son, you know. You can’t change our plans like that.”
“But it’s the playoff game of the season. I can’t miss it.” There was a pathetic quiver in his voice.
Dolores lifted her chin and thrust her jaw out in annoyance. She arched her deformed back slightly, turned to him in her seat and shouted loudly, “We’re going to the party and that’s final. Now, let’s drop the subject.”
“Yes, let’s,” he answered with pathetic resignation as a flush of color washed over his sunken features.
People had begun to turn their heads at this outburst in embarrassment. A young mother in a clingy black sweater clasped her infant daughter closer in a gesture of protection, vaguely smiled and politely looked the other way. Morgan clutched his umbrella with a proprietorial grip and began to finger it nervously again. His feet were now tapping to a syncopated rhythm of rat ta-tat, rat ta-tat. The noise began to grate on the nerves and some passengers began to eye him irritably. Directly opposite him on the other side of the aisle sat a fine-cheeked young girl in a navy blue pea jacket sporting a sleek blonde pony-tail. She was struggling with a large rolled-up museum poster wrapped in a clumsy paper bag. Morgan had difficulty averting his glance at first, but when the bus crossed the bridge and passed the first shop on the right, he looked at the sign—Carpets Cleaned & Exterminating—and then let his eyes fall on the girl. For a while, he stared at her blankly, not really aware of what he was doing.
Dolores was silent for several minutes engulfed in a wave of boredom, then roused herself as if from sleep. She ceased to read the passing shop signs and remembered her lunch that noon with Morgan at Altman’s Café. She frowned for a moment. God, what a slob he is, she thought. Always embarrassing me with the gravy stains on his silk tie. And the noises he makes when he eats. Ugh! Worse than a water buffalo. She looked at him from the corner of her eyes and then turned away in disgust. I wonder if I shouldn’t have married Harry after all. Oh, he was so nice to me back then. I still have his senior ring that he gave me after the prom. She sighed and daintily covered a small burp with her leather-gloved hand. Oh, but he’s gone now, and I’m stuck with this one. Life is hard, life is hard, she began muttering softly to herself.
“What d’ya say?” asked her husband, stirring from his reverie.
“Nothing, Morgan,” she answered crossly. “Make sure you fix the sink when we get home. It’s still leaking.” But she knew her entreaties were all but useless. Since his retirement that year, Morgan had become languid and his senses seemed duller than ever. All he seemed to do was loaf about in his armchair during the day and read the sports pages of the newspaper, or pad about the house in his slippers and pajamas drinking endless cups of instant coffee. Today’s shopping spree was only the second time they had been out together that year.
The poster girl got up and a young man quickly filled the empty seat. He was short, lean with a pasty complexion and curly rat-brown hair. His cheeks were hollow and seemed to be creased in parallel lines up and down his jaws. He was smiling insecurely to himself and kept juggling a manilla envelope between his hands.
“Oh, dear, he looks so much like Owen when he was younger and going through the diet the doctor ordered,” she whispered softly.
“What?” asked Morgan. There was no answer. Their son Owen had long since left home and was now a used car salesman. In his youth, Dolores had been a possessive mother and resented any interest Owen showed in girls his own age. Now, he was still unmarried, and lived with a colleague of his in an apartment complex in a middle-class suburb of New York. Owen was the light of her life, and as a surge of emotion swelled to her face she smiled at the stranger.
Morgan now stared vacantly at the graffiti above the window opposite him: Watch Out For Pick-Pockets, someone had scrawled with a magic marker. At this moment there was a rush of people towards the back of the bus. An elderly woman with puffed-out rheumy eyes and flaunting gaudy oversized enamel earrings came hobbling up on a retractable quad cane and brushed against one of Dolores’s shopping bags. Dolores looked up and exclaimed breathlessly, “My God, it’s Abbie. I don’t believe it! Morgan,” she said poking her husband briskly with her elbow to stir him, “it’s Abbie, you remember—Harry’s wife.”
“Is it you, Dolores? It’s been so long—what, twelve years now, at least,” answered the woman, breaking into a grin that for a second livened her deathly, sunless eyes.
“Abbie, what a coincidence! And I was just thinking about you. That’s the way things happen. All these years. What are you doing with yourself? Were you downtown shopping, too? You’re retired now, aren’t you?”
“No. I’m still working at the lamp store. Even in my condition, they let me work, would you believe it,” Abbie said speaking in slow, measured tones, consciously striving for composure. “You know, when Harry died, he didn’t leave me a cent. Not a cent. He was a bum. Now, there’s hardly a pension either. You can’t live on money like that. So I work. Every day. Even Sundays, I work a little.”
“Poor dear. You poor dear, that’s terrible,” said Dolores with suppressed discomfiture but inwardly slightly pleased to hear of the old woman’s suffering.
“No, really, it’s not so bad,” she replied feebly. “Actually, I enjoy it.”
“Of course you do, dear. Do you live on the same street? You should call me and visit one day,” she shouted as the old woman shuffled down the aisle towards the exit.
“I don’t believe that was Abbie,” whispered Dolores to her husband, barely suppressing a smirk. “She looks so old, you could hardly recognize her. I wonder if she’s happy.”
“Yeah, I wonder,” answered Morgan.
Is he being sarcastic again or just plain stupid, she wondered. They got up as the bus crossed the intersection at Queens Boulevard and Dolores quickly gathered her shopping bags in a panicked flurry of activity. As she sprinted towards the door, her left foot almost tripped on Morgan’s umbrella. She fixed her eyes on him in a hawk-like glare, checked herself, then swore in vexation.
Life is hard. Life is so hard, she shrugged.
DoubleSpeak 