Almost instantly her feeling came back. She felt as achy as if she had been run over. She straightened out her clothes. Bruises would soon appear. Then she felt — and this was truly the worst of it — his mess ooze out of her, into what remained of her underpants. She pushed with her muscles until she got it all out of her, then pulled her panties off, under her skirt, by the side of the road. She wiped herself as efficiently and discreetly as possible with the damp cotton. She felt a deep humiliation holding her underwear in her hand and not knowing what to do next. She shrugged her shoulder up and pushed her face against her short sleeve to wipe the tears out of her hot eyes. She discarded the soiled underpants by the side of the road. She no longer had her rucksack of clothes and few belongings. That was still in the car with them. She had thirty dollars in one of her shoes and that was it.
She sat for a while on a rock at the edge of the road. She stopped crying. Then she thought: It never happened. She would never speak of it, or let herself think of it, ever. She was quite certain that you could change your past, change the facts, by will alone. Only memory makes it real. So eliminate the memory. And if it was also true that there were occasions when she couldn’t control where her mind went — a dream, a cold sweat at an unexpected moment, an odor that would suddenly betray her — time would improve it. Time lessens everything — the good things you desperately want to remember, and the awful things you need to forget. Eventually all will be equally faint. This was one thing her second life had taught her about how humans endure.
It was at this point — and not later, when the meeting with Bobby at their agreed-upon rendezvous point didn’t happen — that she began to inhabit her new life as her only life.
Dead Infants
SHE MADE IT to a friendly, unhip, stranded desert town just over the border from Arizona. Nova, California, population three thousand. It was, despite the best efforts of fifty years of laissez-faire development, a pretty town. It sat on a mesa and looked at desert and mountains. She rented a room with a name she made up on the spot. She spent her last few dollars on hair dye — light brown to match her roots. Leaning close to the mirror, she put on several coats of mascara and some pink lipstick. She patted concealer over the bruise on her chin and finished with face powder that looked a shade too pale. She pulled her newly dyed hair up and piled it on the crown of her head. Then she pinned a wide headband in front of the piled hair.
She landed a waitress job in a diner the very first afternoon she looked. She felt a surge of confidence and safety. The counterculture didn’t exist here. She could have her own hair color and she could have a “public” job. In the vast expanse of this country, who was she to stand out?
Every morning she got up at five. She went to the diner and got ready for the breakfast rush. It was over by eight thirty, and then they would have a long cigarette break and get ready for the lunch rush at eleven thirty. They were busy, which made the time pass quickly. At two she would be exhausted and nearly done with her work. Ready for another cigarette, a change of clothes, and then a beer or a Seven & Seven. The girls all drank Seven & Seven or Canadian Club and Coke.
The next day they would show up, laughing about hangovers and throat clearing behind their fists over cigarettes and coffee. They stacked scratched yellow molded-plastic glasses for water. They refilled ketchup bottles and saltshakers. The quarters and dimes added up to a surprising amount of money. She liked the midmorning coffee break: one lit cigarette after another, and endless cups of weak coffee from thick mugs with permanent stains in the bottoms. It took three packets of sugar and two containers of half-and-half for the coffee to taste of anything. They wiped old, sticky syrup from plastic dispensers with wet cotton rags. They swept the floor and sprayed Windex on the Formica counter (Formica is a decorative laminate made of paper and melamine resin — she couldn’t help but hear Bobby’s voice. But it pleased her that she remembered), then there was yet another cigarette break, and a round of cleaning plastic menus until they signed out at three. Sometimes in the heat of the rush they would move within inches of each other — reach and duck at the exact right moment without saying a word. She felt an adrenaline lift getting it done when five things needed to be done all at once. Being able to do this in the face of chaos gave her a tangible confidence she hadn’t felt before. It was satisfying — a confidence that she wore in her hips.
She wasn’t exactly like these women, it was true, but she was close enough.
These were not “liberated” women. They wore orange-toned Pan-Cake makeup and push-up bras. They all watched their figures (and used that word, figure) and never wore anything but inexpensive, synthetic clothes. They didn’t discuss the issue of vaginal versus clitoral orgasms or debate the inherent oppression of intercourse. But they spoke often of sex and men — all of them were divorced or supporting someone who cheated on them. They wore awful orange-tan stockings and took care of their kids by themselves. They smoked and drank and didn’t mind their lives until they had one too many Seven & Sevens. Then they burst into tears at the prospect of forty more years of the same jobs and the same men, but with less pretty faces and more painful backs.
They weren’t all that different from the consciousness-raising women or from her.
She liked it, and within days she felt she could pass for one of them. She was getting good at this, she really was. It was funny — she thought of it like that, but she was one of them. After all, who were they, exactly?