Three-Martini Lunch by Suzanne Rindell

Author:Suzanne Rindell
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-03-14T11:58:11+00:00

MILES

39

I slept for days. The occasional sound of Wendell yelling in the living room drifted into my bedroom, and even further, into my dreams, but I could not care. At regular intervals, my mother bustled in and out, depositing plates of food and later, seeing them untouched, clearing them away. She washed in and out like the tide. Cob materialized at my bedside, pushing his Coke bottles up the bridge of his nose, holding up a glass jar, showing off a cicada in the process of molting. The grotesque sight of it entered my nightmares, slowly bursting out of its own body like a monster in a horror movie, leaving behind a dead, brittle sculpture of itself still gripping a broken branch.

On the third day, I got up and looked at myself in the mirror.

Even in its worst state, the cicada was more attractive by a long shot.

Janet could not understand why I insisted on saying good-bye over the telephone as opposed to meeting her, as we had planned, in our usual spot in the park. But it was time to go. As soon as I could stand upright without seeing purple spots, I packed a small suitcase and made my way to Port Authority, where I purchased a ticket for a Greyhound. I sat in the back. The engine rumbled to life. We plunged into the Lincoln Tunnel and came up into the light. Marshland and factories. Pitch pine and birch flashing by in chaotic rows, soldiers breaking ranks on the battlefield. Hour by hour, mile by mile, the earth began to flatten. The driver braked at hamburger stands, rest stops. The bus shuddered each time the engine was cut. I imagined the death rattle of a dinosaur. Faces changed, a revolving cast of characters. Smells of grease, of garlic, of cigarettes, of body odor. A tuba was lugged on and carried off. A little girl threw her doll out the window and was spanked very horribly and publicly for all the passengers on the bus to witness.

Woods gave way to corn, corn to wheat, wheat to desert, desert to mountains. A bizarre feeling of disbelief each time the scenery matched expectation: red barn over the cornfield, cartoonish cactus standing in one-armed salute amidst sand, tumbleweed. Everything as different as you could want from New York, everything exactly as promised. The final leg, craggy granite melting into a valley, into foothills and oaks, folds of land opening at last upon the nickel-colored bay. Soaring over the bridge and into the heart of San Francisco, tinge of salt in the air.

Later that night, under the dim bulb in the cramped bathroom of my hotel room, my face in the mirror revealed a map of healing: faint traces of yellows, purples, and indigo dying out under the canvas of my skin. A scab like a thick leathery patch on my cheek, beginning to fall off. An exoskeleton to leave behind.

“What happened to you?” a nosy woman in the bus seat next to me had asked, meaning my face.

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