Motel Girl by Greg Sanders

Author:Greg Sanders [Sanders, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2008-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Sweater

Anna sat in the darkest corner of the park in the middle of the night, knitting. Even though she could see cars going down the lighted avenue and sometimes couples crossing from one side of the park to the other, when she looked down she could only decipher the outline of her arms and fingers, and the sweater was like an emerging shadow. At first it had been the size of a napkin, but it was beginning to grow. She had a vague sense of it and she kept thinking of her father as she knitted, which was the point. Her father was a few blocks away, lying on a big bed in a stuffy room with a nurse sitting outside of his door. Anna had snuck out when things quieted down in the house. It was the middle of June, 1960, and she was in Stuyvesant Square Park in Manhattan.

Two men were smoking a few benches away, and she could tell they didn’t know what she was doing. She figured they could hear the tacking sounds of the knitting needles even though she tried to keep it quiet. For some reason she wasn’t scared. If her father knew she were there, in such blackness, in the darkest of dark folds, so late at night, he would have gotten out of bed, as sick as he was, and dragged her home. She could imagine him, wheezing, swollen-ankled in his bathrobe. Flashlight in one hand, the other gripping a pistol. When she looked over at the smokers she could see the red ember of their cigarette moving between their faces, illuminating their eyes and eyebrows, the contours of their noses.

Then a young woman or girl who was wearing a strong perfume sat down at the opposite end of Anna’s bench. As if there were no empty benches anywhere in the park. Anna saw the figure approach as you might see a blob under your closed eyelids grow larger and take on some kind of definitive form—an iron, a hat, a person walking daintily. The bench creaked, the back deformed slightly as the girl sat down on the other end.

After a few minutes of sitting still, so still that she disappeared into the darkness, this perfumed person said, as if they’d been in the throes of a conversation, “You wouldn’t believe the things my brother wants me to do for him and his friends.” Her voice sounded like that of a well-educated girl who hoped to inherit the world. This, Anna supposed, is what happens when you venture out late at night on your own. Having never done so before, she now could see that with darkness came adventure and a certain unexpected strangeness. She stopped her knitting and looked at the shadow at the other end of the bench, saying nothing, not even exhaling.

“I’m sorry,” the girl said, “It’s rude of me to interrupt like that. My name’s Arabelle. If you don’t mind, may I ask what you’re doing there?”

“I’m knitting a sweater,” Anna said.

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