Three and a Half and Going Nowhere Fast
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Three and a half and going nowhere fast. Ian Schimmel received his Master of Fine Arts in fiction from the University of Houston. Since 2011 he has served as the Parks Fellow and Writer-in-Residence at Rice University. Current projects include a collection of short stories and a novel. IN A SMALL BUT NOT TOO SMALL CITY Ian Schimmel urs has always been a small city. It has everything we need and Othen some, but no more: municipal parks and gardens, muse- ums, a working seaport, a downtown with several official buildings, a modern air terminal. It is an honest, working-class place with reliable dreams, small enough to know many people and run into them again, big enough to never see the same person twice if you do not want. We are situated in a valley below foothills before an ocean. Once upon a time all our ancestors made a living from the sea. This story I am about to describe happened during the rainy sea- son. It was late on a weekday, I remember. I had stayed long at work and when I opened my apartment the phone was ringing. It was my mother and father, both on the line talking on top of the other. My brother had gotten engaged. I had to call and congratulate him. Where had I been? Was I out on a date? Was I meeting anyone new? Why not? Was I depressed? Of course I was depressed, they decided. And if I wasn’t, how could I not be? When would I settle down and give them grandchildren? He can’t find anyone because he won’t apply himself, said my father. And he picks his ear, said my mother. They would often do this, have complete conversations with one another as Glimmer Train Stories, Issue 97, Fall 2016 ©2016 Ian Schimmel 189 Ian Schimmel though I were not there. They were complaining about the weather now, and whether this should be considered drizzle or mist. Seventeen unique forms of precipitation occur in our valley, and so I held my parents there on my shoulder and read the mail while they argued which one this was. The mail was the usual. A few bills and bank offers, what looked like a summons for civic duty, but mostly catalogues and circulars— nothing like the shock that had arrived the day before. It will turn another time for you, said my mother. They’d settled the matter with the weather. It will. It has to, said my father. No, it must. After all, how much worse could it get? They shared this laugh and called me by my pet name and then they told me they loved me and hung up. But I remained there, looking at her telephone number where I’d placed it by the telephone as a reminder. It was beside her magazine— her magazine, I called it now—that shock I’d received in the previous day’s mail, the magazine, on the cover of which she strutted toward me wearing a slit silk charmeuse with filigree lace bodice, pg. 43, this girl, this model, whose number it was. I’d met her the week previous at the grocer’s. This was after I had gone through a long breakup with a girl that I was convinced I loved. She loved me too, I believed, but then she had wanted to see other people. There are plenty of people here! I said. Why did she need to go away to meet other people? And if she wanted to meet other people, well, I could stand right beside her while she did! But somehow she had chosen her mind. People here were all the same, she said, and they all ended up the same. What was she supposed to do, she protested, marry me and end up working in the city bank? Those women start with two eyebrows and forty years later—she pointed at her forehead and then she held the finger at me. They have only one! She was going away to university, to a truly big city, but that was ruined when her father passed suddenly and her mother and younger sisters required her work. So there she was, many months later, still 190 Glimmer Train Stories IN A SMALL BUT NOT TOO SMALL CITY with the same job, miserable and sad, but stubborn as ever behind her register, and for some reason that she alone knew we were not together. And that’s where I met the other girl, this girl on the magazine cover. I was doing my shopping, buying wild dates, in fact. She and I reached for the same and sent the whole collection down. Flute music played in the ceiling. We apologized and gathered them, and I explained a similar experience I’d had during a school trip to a medical museum with an exhibit of antique prostheses. She laughed. The manager was gaping now, tapping his shoe at the end of the aisle. I asked her if she was from around here—which of course by her fashion I knew that she was—and where she lived, and she told me, and I happened to have a cousin who lived in that part of town, and she looked at me suspiciously, dates in hand, and said her fam- ily name—the small joke in our small city being that everyone has a cousin who lives or works everywhere else, and that more often than not we are all related. Then and now you would hear about a friend who had on accident dated too close a relation, and then the joke was not a joke at all, but I liked this bit of local irreverence—and from so stunning a person! I don’t know what happened because this was not like me, especially not with beautiful women—I asked for her number. She seemed surprised as well. She said, My number? Everyone was watching us now. Nothing captures the attention like new romance, or auto accidents. He’s not worth it, said the old woman who was filling out her bank slip at the register. Ah, but who is to say, offered the manager, arms crossed, voice softening. The clam and the gull. This referring to that children’s story about unlikely love. Meanwhile my ex, in her staring, had forgotten an onion on the scale and the old woman snapped, Are you going to charge me for your fat hand, too?! The older woman snatched the onion off, shaking it and generally making a scene, as older women in our town will do once their beauty has fled, and so the girl and I were in private once again. Here, she said, handing me a torn slip, and it felt like the foreign films—the guy getting the girl, not as in our films, the guy drinking so he forgets the girl—and I was brought so far elsewhere by this that when I remembered to look up and thank her she was gone. Fall 2016 191 Ian Schimmel I was still in too jumbled a mood, and so I put my items back and had almost made it to the opposite street when I heard my name. My ex was in the doorway, apron in her fist. People had always told me that she looked like her father and I had never seen it—thankfully!—but now I did. She stood capably but inelegantly, like the women who worked at the bank, the woman she feared becoming. And yet it was this person that I had ached over. And over. I looked at her now and tried to make that feeling again, but all I grew was pity. She repeated my name, her face crowded with fury, and, I thought, not a little fear. But instead I bowed and walked home, smiling—I don’t know why— leaving her to call after me, through our streets, through our valley, through our hills, Fool! A week had passed since I spoke with my parents, and every day she stood there on her cover, the girl who I had met. A model! Who had given me her number! So why hadn’t I called? Because reality had inevitably set in, which was the same set of ideas without exclamation. She was a model. On the cover. I was not that clam and she was not that seagull. I was a student at the local university, trying to convince himself that he enjoyed foreign films and beer, who was not, as girls had gently implied or stated outright, all that attractive. I was the funny one, the one who could make them laugh. And then one morning I woke up. It was misting or fogging and I felt likewise in mind. I had stayed out with friends the night before and come home again, alone. Perhaps I did what I did then because I was still in a dream. Or maybe it was remembering how my friends had replied when I told them I was thinking of moving to a truly big city, and they had all turned laughing. Or perhaps I was still drunk. Whatever the instance, I stood. I splashed water upon my face. I seized her number from the sinktop and the phone. It was ringing. Hello? said a female voice. I was awake. So you’re calling me? she said. This after I apologized and remem- bered to explain who I was. Why are you calling me two weeks too late? She sounded like she had sat down, but in none too good a mood.