Five Short Stories

A Time When You Were Alone

 

It is Winter

 

            It is nine o’clock on Saturday night. You sit on the grey fabric seats of your white Ford ’99 Explorer in the Church parking lot on the corner of the street where your best friend lives. The church sits in your small suburban town quietly. It is the “Church of Saint Ann” and when you drive by fast enough you swear that it is called the Church of Satan and you giggle at the irony of that.

            You don’t really have any where to go exactly. But it is Saturday and this is where you meet your best friend. The cold is seeping in through the windows and you press your head against it. It feels like winter. The dry heat of the rattling car and the frozen ice over the church parking spaces seem to define your idea of what winter is.

            She is late. You want to feel angry but you are content with sitting in your car and feeling winter. You also understand that even when her champagne ’89 Honda Prelude flies up the hill into the parking lot that you will still have no where to go. You will choose whose car to take and you will hope that she agrees that you will take hers. Your car loves to hold you inside against the cold but her stick shift car loves to race around bends and listen to music really loud.

            You will spend the night driving around your small suburban town. You will slip across town lines and you will sing at the top of your lungs to your favorite songs. You will feel infinite and you won’t be able to explain it. Because you pass other kids and they are driving to no where too. And you guess it is that destination that gives you that feeling of being indestructible but you know that the small suburban roads wind. And the winter paves the street with sparkling layers of black ice. You feel like life is a never ending poem that will taste good with every line. But it is Saturday, it is winter, and there are kids driving too fast to get to no where all over.

 

About a Person

 

“I Love Lucy”

 

            I think that when everyone is little they have someone they idolize. For me, it was my Father’s Mother. We called her Mimi and to this day I wish that we hadn’t done that. I knew that she hated it. She had a dream that one day her grandchildren would call her Grandma Janet. She told me this when I was seven. I didn’t realize that I was breaking that dream every time I called her Mimi. I wish I could take all those times back.

            My parents would let me stay at her house sometimes for a whole weekend. I was seven but she would treat me as if I were thirty-four. I don’t know why but that’s exactly how old I felt when I was with her. We would climb into her green Cadillac. The interior was the color of my fair skin and I was careful never to get it dirty. Everything Mimi had was immaculate. She hated the thought of her car becoming old and run down. She told me this when I was seven. I wish I understood then that keeping everything perfect can sometimes be a bad thing. But more than that I wish we hadn’t gotten rid of that car. Or I wish I was old enough to interview all the possible owners and maybe make them write me reasons why they wanted the car and sign a contract to keep it perfect. There is something about cars; they can hold people in the stitching of their seats. I wish I could see that car just one more time.

            She would let me watch “I Love Lucy” on Nick at Nite until past midnight. She would let us eat in front of the TV. on TV. trays that I didn’t know then, but realize now, were straight out of the fifties. She would let me sleep in her giant bed with a pink comforter made for a Queen and we would watch TV. until I feel asleep. I never thought about what happened to the TV. after I feel asleep. I guess she always turned it off. I wish I thought about that. I wish I offered to turn it off. I wish I understood then that she loved watching “I love Lucy” with me because she lived her life as if it were not real. As if she was happy all the time and everything was perfect. I wish I understood then why she lived like this. Sometimes I wish I could go back to being just seven and tell her that I understand now. I would tell her that she didn’t have to live like that anymore. I wish I could go back.

 

About a Moment When You Understood Something About World Beyond You

 

A Man

 

            We filtered into the university auditorium. There was that tangible somber feeling that attends any funeral but it was accompanied by a deeper sense of grief that I have never seen before. I sat in the section saved for members of the Miss Porter’s School community. We were all together which made it a little bit better but it felt like everyone was holding their breath and running out of air.

            A man, a father, a husband, a doctor staggered to the stage as the audience gasped. I don’t mean that there was a figurative gasp of surprise and awe in the audience but every member of the audience actually sucked in air as if the world was running out. And the man, the father, the husband, the doctor spoke of his beloved wife and two daughters without stumbling over a single word.

            And I don’t know if it was the stories in the newspaper that week or the pictures on the TV that brought over two thousand people to the funeral that day but we all wanted to reach out to the man, the father, the husband, the doctor and hold him. Of course we couldn’t all do that. Many people there that day had never met him or his family before. All those people found the love and held the sadness to get in their cars and drive over to the auditorium that day to see a man they’d never met stand in front of them and speak of his loved ones whom they’d never met. And all those people live in the same world as the two thieves who walked into the man’s house one week ago and beat the man until he couldn’t stand to defend his family as they were raped and tied with rope covered in gasoline and ignited by the matches they kept in their cupboard next to their Advil.

           

A Specific Place

 

Tak It EZ

 

            The pebbles of the driveway hurt my feet as I pounce out of the car because it is the beginning of summer and my feet have been spoiled by the comfort of warm winter boots for months now. It is warm, the end of June, and I carry my bags up the two steps into the front door of the cottage. The cottage is small, green with yellow shudders, and it is called “Tak it EZ”. These letters are cut out of wood and painted yellow. They hang above the door crooked on purpose to support the carefree easy feeling of the house.

            The linoleum on the kitchen floor is old and dirty from the bare feet of many children. The house was built by my grandmother’s grandfather. It can only be used in the summer because it doesn’t have any heat or insulation. The kitchen leads to the small hallway which opens to a family room, three bedrooms, and a bathroom. Beyond the family room is a porch with a roof and screens for windows. I throw my bags down on the porch and run out the old heavy door and down the stairs. I am careful only to step on the big rocks that build the path from the house to the lake. The grass around the rocks conceals more of the little pebbles from the driveway and my feet cannot handle them this early in the season.

            The wooden dock is even lower to the water level than I remember but I swing down to the edge and dip my feet in the cool lake. For the most part everything looks the same as it’s always looked from here. Cottages neatly line the edge of the small lake and I can see nearly around the entire body of water from here.  Cool feet, warm air, the season is summer and for now I will take it easy.

 

Involving Several People

 

Rings

 

            My six best friends and I all stood in the Freshman Day Student room at our all girls boarding high school. We were dressed in our Big D attire. Sun dresses and heels made us all feel like we were so old. We stared down at our right hands held in a circle as if we were some sort of athletic team gearing up to give a cheer to kick-off the big game. Julia shouted hang on guys, hang on! as she tried to get a picture of all of our hands together. We laughed because we barely recognized our own hands. We had just received our high school rings. They shone brightly on our fingers, gold with the letters ‘MPS’. Receiving your ring at the end of your freshman year is like a right of passage into being an upperclassman at Miss Porter’s School.

            We took turns wishing in each other’s rings. All girls schools tend to come along with many traditions and MPS is no different. Not only does the act of receiving your ring contain many important steps and rituals but once you receive your ring you must get all of your friends to wish on it. I touched my ring finger to my best friend’s ring finger and we slid my ring off my finger onto hers making sure not to break the bond while she wished on it. Next she slid her ring onto my ring finger. I squeezed my eyes shut tight the way you do when you are small and you are at church and you really want the minister to believe that you are praying real hard. I probably should have wished something big about her future sucess or happiness but you can’t really force what you truly wish. I wished that she would wear her ring forever.