Rust Read Free Page B

with all those rusty parts strewn far and near. She felt herself detach, her calmness moving inward while a more engaged self suddenly floated upward, far above the scene, coming to rest in one of the highest branches of the Chinese elms, the one that shaded her work area and had the “No Trespassing” sign nailed to it. She had all the time she needed in that one split second to evaluate the words he had said, and she could have chosen to reach out to him with a kind, soothing remark, or even a witticism that dispersed his comment into little remnants, like fireworks on their way to nothingness. Or she could have chosen to stare at the ground, as if she were digging a hole with her eyes and burying the moment in it. She was a bartender, after all, adept at sidestepping arrows and darts of sexuality, letting them fly past her no matter how excellent the aim.
    But something had shifted deep inside of Margaret as she tore out of the east, slipped silently through the factory towns of Ohio, crossed the Mississippi with hardly a glance to the right or left, and then stampeded over the plains, the engine of her Dodge Colt Vista straining like a horse forced to run too far too fast. So focused was she on the highway ahead, and then the center line disappearing in one long stripe behind her, that she hardly noticed the fine mist that rose from her pores like a tiny rainstorm in reverse. Perhaps she mistook it for sweat, because the car was hot, hot as hell, so hot she wore two bandanas to catch the drips, one around her neck and one around her hairline, which also helped keep her long black ponytail from blowing into her eyes. Yet she never passed a wrist across her forehead, never wiped her palms on her summer drawstring pants. What seeped upward from deep inside through her skin, or perhaps was sucked out of her body by the high speed, the heat, and the intensity of the highway, were tears she never shed. These tears, frozen inside her for so long, melted in the heat, and washed away her willingness to give even one more inch.
    Margaret had given inches and feet, yards and miles, for thirteen years behind the bar. And the night she cashed out for the last time and then dumped out her tip jar on the wooden tabletop in the back booth of the Stereophonic Lounge and counted up the quarters and dollar bills, it had hit her like a sledgehammer, how much she had given. She had never allowed herself to acknowledge it before, what it cost her every night to smile, banter, pretend that every man who sidled up to the bar was magnetic, defer to every woman, play the game of bartender. She’d had her last drink—a margarita made from freshly squeezed limes—served to her with fanfare by Mitch, the owner of the Lounge and a good friend in a casual way, feeling as if she were in a slow motion car wreck, a feeling that persisted on the drive home and made her wary of changing lanes or taking the curves of the BQE at high speed.
    There she was at thirty-seven, five years past the last defensible moment, in her own opinion, that a woman should be a bartender, and what did she have to show for it? Her small savings, some good bar stories, a few intimate moments or months with musicians who had gone on to become great and sometimes famous, who, she was certain, hadn’t thought of her in years. She had a storage bin in Queens packed with paintings and drawings, some of which she knew were garbage and some of which she thought were worthy of a wall in the Whitney, a whole show perhaps, though she knew she’d never get one. They documented the underworld she lived in, had always lived in, ever since she was a child, shuffled off at five years old to live with her grandfather while her parents backpacked for a year through India. They never came home. Even the cards, letters, and little gifts—like tiny elephants carved from onyx and gauze shirts with mirrors embroidered into the edges—stopped arriving in the mailbox.
    Her grandfather, Donny, a