Like Life Read Free Page B

station to greet her. Boy Number Two would probably not be. He was poor and carless and feeling unappreciated. Perhaps One, in a dash from the office, in a characteristically rash gesture, would take a break from campaign considerations and be waiting with flowers. It wasn’t entirely a long shot.
    Mary struggled off the bus with her bag. She was still groggy from sleep, and this aspect of life, getting on and off things, had always seemed difficult. Someone spoke her name. She looked to one side and heard it again. “Mary.” She looked up and up, and there he was: Boy Number Two in a holey sweater and his hair in V’s.
    “An announcement,” called the PA system. “An announcement for all passengers on …”
    “Hi!” said Mary. The peculiar mix of gratitude and disappointment she always felt with Two settled in her joints like the beginnings of flu. They kissed on the cheek and then on the mouth, at which point he insisted on taking her bag.
    They passed through the crowd uneasily, trying to talk but then not trying. The bus station was a piazza of homelessness and danger, everywhere the heartspin of greetings and departures: humid, ambivalent. Someone waved to them: a barelegged woman with green ooze and flies buzzing close. An old man with something white curled in the curl of his ear approached and asked them for a dollar. “For food!” he assured them. “Not drink! Not drink! For food!”
    Two pulled a dollar from his pocket. “There you go, my man,” he said. It suddenly seemed to Mary that she would have to choose, that even if you didn’t know who in the world to love, it was important to choose. You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one’s heart to knock against like a spook in the house.
    Two had no money for a cab but wanted to walk Mary home, one arm clamped around her back and upper arms. They made their way like this across the city. It used to be that Two would put a big, limp fish hand in the middle of her spine, but Mary would manage to escape, stopping and pointing out something—“Look, Halley’s Comet! Look, a star!”—so now he clamped her tightly, pressed against his side so that her shoulders curved front and their hips bumped each other.
    Mary longed to wriggle away.
    At her door she thanked him. “You don’t want me to come upstairs with you?” Two asked. “I haven’t seen you in so long.” He stepped back, away from her.
    “I’m so tired,” said Mary. “I’m sorry.” The Hamilton Pork men stood around, waiting for another delivery and grinning. Two gave her back her suitcase and said, “See ya,” a small mat of Dixie cup and gum stuck to one shoe.
    Mary went upstairs to listen to the messages on her machine. There was a message from an old school friend, a wrong number, a strange girl’s voice saying, “Who are you? What is yourname?” and the quick, harried voice of Number One. “I’ve forgotten when you were coming home. Is it today?” Then another wrong number. “Who are you? What is your name?” Then Number One’s voice again: “I guess it’s not today, either.”
    She lay down to rest and didn’t unpack her bag. When the phone rang, she leaped up, and the leap knocked her purse and several books off the bed.
    “It’s you,” said Boy Number One.
    “Yes,” said Mary. She felt a small, short blizzard come to her eyes and then go.
    “Mary, what’s wrong?”
    “Nothing,” she said, and tried to swallow. When tenderness ended, there was a lull before the hate, and things could spill out into it. There was always so much to keep back, so much scratching behind the face. You tried to shoo things away, a broomed woman with a porch to protect.
    “Did you have a good trip?”
    “Fine. I was hoping you might be there to meet me.”
    “I lost your postcard and forgot what—”
    “That’s OK. My brother picked me up instead. I see what my life is: I tell my brother when I’m going to be home, and I tell you when I’m going to