Bang Bang

Rose slammed into the house, sweaty from a bike ride. Her hands stank. The cheap bicycling gloves she had bought at K-Mart five years ago were falling apart and smelly. She kept forgetting to buy new gloves. She washed her hands repeatedly to get rid of the stench. She threw the bicycling gloves into the washing machine.

All the perfumes of Arabia...

Rose was allergic to perfume. She couldn’t wash with perfumed soap, let alone perfumes of Arabia. She once developed an infection from a scented bubble bath. She couldn’t do the Lady Macbeth thing.

Though she was mad at Ben.

Exasperated. Some woman had called him at home. Rose had answered the phone.

Who are you? the woman asked.

Ben’s wife, Rose said. Who are you?

I need to talk to Ben. Just tell him Christine called, she said.

When Ben came home, he called Christine immediately. He stayed on the line two minutes.

Then he took Rose’s hand. I have an emergency.

Rose raised her eyebrows. An emergency named Christine?

She’s a client. Her life is in danger. She has nowhere to go. I’m going to drive her to a shelter.

And why are you the one she calls on a weekend? At home.

Her boyfriend beat her up. He’s the father of her children. She was busted for meth and lost custody. She came to see me about her legal options.

And how old is this Christine? Rose asked cynically.

Ben looked guilty. Twenty, twenty-one.

Uh huh.

After he left, she took a pill. She’d been off them for a while. She hated the numbing feeling. Send a soldier into battle on a high enough dose of antidepressants and maybe he won’t feel anything, she thought cynically. Bang bang.

She packed a thermos and a sandwich and biked on a trail that ended in a small town twenty miles away. After the first ten miles, she felt calmer. She saw an indigo bunting. She ceased to think and feel. In a park in the small town she ate her sandwich and read THE NEW YORKER .

Suddenly it occurred to her that Ben had been working late every night for two weeks. She wondered about the hang-up calls at home.

This wasn’t the first time he’d had an affair. Like Hillary Clinton, she’d stuck by her man.

Why? she wondered.

The bicycling burned up her anger. After a forty-mile bike ride, she was ready to talk to Ben about his absences. But the house was empty. He hadn’t come home.

There was nothing to do except play loud music and call her best friend.

Want to go to dinner and a movie? she asked

Sure. But isn’t this date night. Where’s Ben?

Working.

Her friend laughed. Now that’s obscene. It’s not like he’s a corporate lawyer raking in the dough.

Around noon he said he was helping some twenty-year-old woman with a meth problem and a violent boyfriend, she said. I haven’t seen him since.

Well, said her friend. It sounds like horseshit. But who knows?

Rose changed her clothes and walked the two blocks to the restaurant, trying to leave her grief at home. She was too old to fall apart, to shred a favorite book in the river, to sob hysterically for days, or to burn her lover’s letters. She was once-removed from her emotions.

She was an American on prescription drugs, her brain the fried egg in the old commercial....("This is your brain...this is your brain on drugs...")

Her friend was sitting at a table in front of the restaurant, plugged into an iPod, singing along to a Counting Crows song. She was the only one on the terrace.

Rose managed to smile at her friend.

Her friend passed her the iPod.