A Longing for Impossible Things by David Borofka

Author:David Borofka
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

She has only the vaguest notion of what she might do, what she might say, but if she thinks too specifically about what she’s planning, she will know her stupidity for what it is. There’s every rational reason why it’s the wrong thing. But if she doesn’t think, if she lets nature take its course, then what is meant to happen will happen. Stay loose, she thinks. Be in the moment. Don’t become your mother, don’t worry everything to death. She selects the sheer cranberry blouse that her mother won’t let her wear and her tightest jeans, so often washed they are more white than blue. Bone white. In all of the turmoil of the past weeks, she has lost five pounds, and her clothes feel good, as though they have been made specifically for her, so there is something to be said for the positive effects of catastrophe. Her blouse with its spark of color gladdens her, even as the gauzy, see-through material annoys her mother. Her hair, well, her hair is another story; it’s a mess, it needs to be trimmed and layered, some highlights wouldn’t hurt, but there’s nothing to be done at this very moment except pin it back and hope for the best. Her mother may be a hair stylist, but her mother’s daughter’s hair is a disaster, her worst feature. Isn’t that just the way life is?

She closes the door to their motel room with the sense that something big, something momentous, is on the verge of happening, but at the bus stop she only regrets not wearing her coat. The December sky is clear, the morning fog has burned off, but the sun is all light and no heat. And even after she steps aboard the bus, she continues shivering. This is what vanity will do, she thinks, and the words echo her mother’s voice. Vanity and superstition. She is hardly vain, she has never had money enough for clothes to be truly vain, since she has always had to make do with discount store discoveries: last year’s tops and skirts, secondhand jeans, resoled and serviceable shoes. In her mother’s mind, their poverty is a guard against the larger sins. Still, her coat is terrible, a threadbare canvas thing with cuffs that are frayed and dark from use; wearing it would give away her disguise. The sophisticated college student would be revealed for what she truly is: a penniless drab just this side of welfare.

Across the aisle in the seat opposite hers, is a man fallen asleep with his head against the window. His mouth is open, but for some reason she has the uncomfortable sensation that he is only pretending to be asleep, and that as soon as she turns away, his eyes will open to slits, so he might watch her every move. Such self-induced panic nearly threatens to dislodge that sense of imminence that rests near her stomach, and she lurches off the bus one stop earlier than she intended.

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