~This story was previously
published in Artisan, a Journal of Craft (2005).
Alice, who one cold February day abandoned
her career as a Kelly Girl, sublet her small, bad-smelling apartment on
Broadway and 107th Street and flew away to live in Spain, began to
realize on the airport bus entering Madrid that the line between spontaneity
and insanity was finer that she’d thought.
Brushing away doubt as though it were a
spider, she hailed a taxi at the Plaza de Colon bus terminal, gave the address
of the Pension Rosa – selected for the admittedly corny reason that it faced
the Palace Hotel recommended by Hemingway – and insisted, politely but firmly,
upon being allowed to inspect the room she’d reserved before taking it.
“Como
mi casa en Nueva York,” she murmured, meaning that the room on offer was as
dark and smelly as the Upper West Side studio, though the landlady accepted the
perceived compliment with a faint relaxation of her scowl.
Days later, reflecting on the pass her life
had come to, Alice would recall that this had been the only occasion when
anyone in all of Madrid had come even close to smiling at her.
Every morning, she took her café con
leche and roll in the pension dining room in the company of two middle-aged
women who looked like sisters and who spoke neither to her nor to each
other.
Fearfully, the pair lifted their heads as
Alice seated herself at the oval “family-style” dining table, made the sign of
the cross in unison, and returned their gaze to the crumbs on the
tablecloth.
Generalissimo Franco had been dead four
years, but Alice decided the Spaniards had not truly absorbed the news; even
when drinking beer at sidewalk cafés they appeared joyless and furtive, like a
dog that jumps on a sofa but keeps an ear cocked for its owner’s return.
Having consumed as much hot milk as the
eagle-eyed landlady would allow, she set out on a series of trivial errands
planned the night before with a view to avoiding spending the entire day in her
nightgown reading Daniel Deronda under musty blankets.
In a dusty perfumeria near the city
center she purchased individual sachets of shampoo and conditioner every day
from a gentle, dour man who, she hoped, might worry if one morning she failed
to appear.
Just imagining herself choking to death on
a heel of bread in her pension room, her partially-decomposed
body shipped home after being identified through dental records because the
landlady (who, after receiving Alice’s advance deposit stated flatly that she
hated Americans) had thrown away her passport – filled her with horror; a
horror that was curiously tinged with pleasure.
Knowing that she could avoid this grim
finale to her Spanish adventure merely by dropping a few postcards in the mail,
Alice wrote neither to her family nor to her faithless ex-boyfriend.
Let alone begin the novel she’d come to
Madrid to compose; after a week of speaking to no one, there were no words left
in Alice’s head.
Museums, it turns out, are an excellent
refuge for the mute: ticket sellers there are so accustomed to foreigners so
that that whole transaction can be effected by raising one finger.
Near the Pension Rosa Alice discovered a
convent which housed a small collection of saints’ bones and teeth cradled in
jeweled coffers; beside each display a card described the martyr’s final,
gruesome agony in a detail that could only be called loving – this gallery
became Alice’s favorite haunt, although she appeared to be the only tourist who
ever bought a ticket from the nun who guarded the entrance from her hard wooden
chair.
Once outside again, in the sharp spring
wind, Alice sighed deeply and proceeded with her afternoon project, which was
to familiarize herself with her new city by taking different buses to the end
of the line and back to the Pension Rosa.
Perhaps, at this point, she could have
acknowledged that she’d made a mistake – that Madrid was not the heart’s balm
of blue skies and hibiscus she’d anticipated, but a gray expanse of overbearing
government buildings hunched around treeless plazas; the madrileños who sat
opposite her frowned as if they’d hailed this bus for the sole purpose of
letting her know how deeply they deplored her hanging blonde hair, her baggy
jeans, her clownish running shoes – yet she saw, suddenly, why heretics upon
the scaffold did not recant, but glowered defiantly back at the crowds.
Quite simply: they were thrilled to be the
center of attention.
Regarding each boarding passenger with
interest, as though they were fellow-guests arriving at a party, Alice tried to
imagine their lives: the working-class housewife, with her plump folded hands
and splayed thighs, the office worker wearing a hand-knitted pullover under his
thin suit jacket, the haughty schoolgirl who had no idea how brief her perfect
loveliness would turn out to be.
She noticed expatriates: they were mostly
women – some looking as old as thirty, whose Indian-print skirts and Earth
shoes betrayed how long they’d been in exile, and who lugged their heavy canvas
bags of English teaching materials with such an air of weariness that Alice
surmised they were all in love with Spaniards who never intended to divorce
their wives, no matter what permissive laws were passed by the new democracy – or
perhaps she only understands this limbo now, in retrospect.
That day, she may only have supposed that
the tired, pale woman who plopped down beside her on the bench of the bus was
in need of a friendly greeting in her own language, and in answer to her
compatriot’s question of why she was in Spain, Alice plunged in eagerly,
describing her last temp job on Canal Street, where she’d been given boxes of
manuscripts to xerox (“I was distracted because of a problem I was having with
my boyfriend, so I didn’t even look at what I was copying until mid-morning
when there was a paper jam, and I realized what I had in my hand was a page of
fiction, if you could call it that, and that the men sitting at typewriters in
the next room were all writing these books as I photocopied them; you’d think
there’d have been sighs or moans but there was nothing like that; just men
staring at the keys with bored faces, and one of them got up and came over to
the copy machine and told me he’d thought this job was too good to be true, but
that it was more tiring than he’d imagined to think pornographic thoughts eight
hours a day because his mind kept wandering to his phone bill, and when I
laughed he said all he really wanted was to go back to Spain, where he’d been
working on his screenplay and living cheaply, and I just stood there with that
page in my hand and decided the answer to my problem was to just leave,
and I started calculating how much temp work I’d have to do to earn a ticket,
because you can make good money temping if you never turn down work, and I
became so enthralled with this idea that I ignored the guy, who since it was
New York found rudeness sexy or something, and when he called me a few days
later to ask me out I said I was on my way to Madrid and he said – you won’t
believe this – he said, ‘but you can’t just run away from your life.’
Unbeknownst
to most people, you can just run away,” Alice concluded.
“Very true,” the American woman nodded,
hoisting her bag onto her knees.
“Well, here’s my stop; don’t worry, you’ll
find something here – what did you say your job in the States was again?”
“Xeroxing,” Alice whispered, mortified, and
turned quickly to look out the window.
Yes, she’d already gone completely mad from
loneliness and was raving to strangers.
Zapatos:
the bus chuffed up the Gran Via, through the shoe district, but when Alice read
the word on storefront after storefront, she didn’t think, “shoes,” she
actually saw the things, hundreds of pairs, even after she closed her
eyes – brown and black and tan, with their heels and laces and straps dancing
in the middle horizon of her brain, and this is what she would remember of that
far-off time in Madrid, and of the foolish twenty-two-year-old she’d been: not
her humiliation and flight, nor the days and nights of morbid fancies and
thoughts of death, but how a new language suddenly took up lodgings in her mind
– in gleaming, dreamy pictures.
*****
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
After many years of working as
journalists in Latin America, my husband and I moved back to the States in 1997
with our children when he got a Nieman fellowship at Harvard. As the trailing
spouse, I got to take classes, too, so I signed up for a fiction workshop with
Anne Bernays. Our first in-class exercise was to write a paragraph in which
each sentence started with a consecutive letter of the alphabet. Out of that
assignment came this story. I’ve written dozens of short stories since then,
but this one is perhaps the most literally true—I was still in terror of
newspaper editors finding a wrong fact—and the only thing I made up was the
protagonist’s name. When I was twenty-two, the idea that you could change your
life simply by going somewhere else had seemed like a revelation. Later, of
course, it’s not so easy to do. But
there’s nothing more American than that: lighting out for the territory.
*****
ABOUT KATHLEEN WHEATON
Kathleen Wheaton is the author of
the collection, Aliens and Other Stories, which won the 2013 Washington
Writers Publishing House fiction prize.
Her stories have appeared in numerous publications, including Narrative,
the Potomac Review, the Baltimore Review, and New South.
She has received three Society of Professional Journalists awards for feature
writing and she is a regular contributor to Bethesda Magazine. She lives
in Bethesda, Maryland with her husband.
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