The Liability of Love by Susan Schoenberger

Author:Susan Schoenberger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2021-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

—20—

Brenda

Brenda had learned about the circulatory system in a college biology class during the year she had flirted with the idea of becoming a nurse. The diagrams in that class had fascinated her. In them, she could see that skin and bones were only the crude outlines. The circulatory system powered the production and told the true story. Bodies could recline, sit in a chair, be at rest; the heart could not.

Thus it was possible for her to act normally around Mr. Fitzhugh, to fetch his coffee and to remind him to call his mother back, even as the blood shot through her veins in a worrisome fashion. Her body kept its distance as her heart tapped the urgent Morse code of love in his direction. When he was heavier, she sometimes thought she might have a chance. With her alopecia, each of them had roughly equivalent physical deficiencies. But since he had lost weight, she had less hope. He was a catch now with his thick, dark hair and nice, even teeth, and now, a definable neck. She still wouldn’t call him handsome by Hollywood standards, but his salary, which she knew from processing paperwork, permitted many women to see him through specialty glasses with green-tinted lenses.

Mr. Fitzhugh didn’t know that Brenda was looking for other jobs, or that she had finally finished her bachelor’s degree. She was twenty-six now. Time to shake the sand out of the beach towel of her pointless pining and fold it up, take it elsewhere. Maybe find a lake or a pond. She wasn’t cut out for the ocean. Except that the ocean was where the breeze never died, where the salt air cleansed and renewed, where a barefoot walk was as good as a pedicure in exfoliating your feet, where a head wrapped in a silk scarf didn’t look out of place. Where everyone wanted to be.

She was considering applying to a small computer company that was looking for someone to manage projects. Almost everyone had computers now. It made her wonder why she had wasted so much time learning to type a flawless eighty words per minute. If she got the job, she would walk into Mr. Fitzhugh’s office and she would shake his hand, then grasp it with two hands, staring into his sad brown eyes. She would give him a long look, and he would know. He would know everything.

“Brenda, you in there?”

She and her mother were making pies for the church, which they did once a month. Four apple, three sweet potato, one pecan for the minister. Her mother found solace in a perfect crust: feed the congregation, feed the soul. For Brenda, chores like this one occupied her hands but not her mind, leaving too much time to moon over Mr. Fitzhugh. He would never see inside her in the way she needed to be seen, and yet, she could not seem to shut off the yearning. It was like a faucet with a faulty valve.

“Need something?”

“Pass the flour.

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