After Delores by Sarah Schulman

Author:Sarah Schulman [Schulman, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781551525167
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press

13

I WENT STRAIGHT from Beatriz’s house to The Blue and the Gold and started drinking in a little booth behind the jukebox. When you begin to think about drinking and staying away from it, every dark street sends out a personalized path of light leading directly to a bar. It offers something to do, a place to watch the clock, and when you’re drunk enough to sleep, you can go home. But, if you stay out of bars, there’s nowhere to go but home, and then no place to go from there.

The news was on the TV but they were bombing Libya and I couldn’t handle that. Then the channel got changed to the ball game, which doesn’t interest me at all. I had to find something to think about in a stein of flat beer and a bag of Dipsy Doodles. When that’s your evening activity, the beer goes down real fast and then there’s nothing to do but buy another one. I was thinking about smashing Delores’s face with a hammer, when I looked up and there she was. She was sitting at the bar, legs crossed, drinking a White Russian. She had dyed her hair bright orange and was bouncing her foot up and down in Sunshine’s clothes, expensive and too big for her. There was a white headband wrapped around her forehead that made Delores’s skin pale and her wrinkles deeper. She didn’t look hip. She looked silly like Grandma Bozo.

I wanted to run out of there, but where to? Or run right up to her and scream in her ear, or flash Priscilla’s gun, which was home in my drawer. I wanted to spit on her and break her neck and beg her to come back to me.

Delores was so close, I could hear her swallow. The sound gurgling in her throat made me nauseous. If I listened to the rain the way I listed to Delores’s spit, I would have drowned right there in the bar. She was the woman with whom I had been living and loving, and at the same time a monstrous orange thing.

The day she left, I sat in my apartment, so sad. I didn’t know how to be that sad. She was yelling at me and I just sat there.

“I’m leaving you for a woman who is going to marry me. You had your chance and now you just can’t take it.”

“I can’t help it that I can’t take it,” I said.

What did I love about Delores? It was something concrete that she would do or say, it was how I’d feel when I saw her. She was always so happy when I came home and she liked being next to me walking down the street. She’d slip her arm into mine and say, “Oh, I’m so cozy.” It was a sense of well-being above anything else. The problems started when she talked about “forever.” My idea was that we stay together for as long as it worked and then something else would happen.

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