Paullina Simons - A Song in the Daylight

The phone rang; she didn’t answer. The doorbell rang. Two men were delivering a dishwasher. She had to leave her book project half completed and babysit Chris the installer and his non-speaking companion, who shook their heads at her dicey kitchen cabinets and said the new machine might not fit without tearing up the floor. “But we’re jacks of all trades,” hefty Chris said with a smile. “We know what we’re doing.”

She smiled wanly.

She didn’t want to go out today. Hobbling down to the basement, she opened the freezer to see if there was any dubious forgotten meat she could defrost. Maybe they could go vegetarian tonight, fettuccine Alfredo. With bacon bits. Almost vegetarian, that is, if you didn’t count the chunks of smoked pig. She could mask the lack of food with garlic bread, except she didn’t have any bread. Or garlic. Or bacon bits.

The stainless-steel, smart-wash, nine-cycle machine with sanitized rinse and heated dry hadn’t arrived until noon. By the time the crack installers left—without tearing up her floor—it was almost one. She had planned to take a shower before she went out, but now there was no time. She had to pick up Michelangelo from school at 2:40. Besides, to have a shower, she needed Jared to tape her casted leg inside a plastic bag. She didn’t think asking Chris and his buddy, the jacks of all trades, to help a naked woman with a broken leg get into the tub was such a swell idea or qualified under one of the trades they were jacks of.

Though truth be told, if she had a choice, she’d rather have two unshaved strangers help her naked into the shower than stagger to King’s unwashed and unpainted.

But the children, the husband, they needed to eat. The children! What about the children? King’s was overrun. The entire population of Summit seemed to be clamoring for the tiny parking lot behind King’s, 20,000 cars trying to fit into 200 spaces. No one but she could do the math. She sat for exactly three seconds waiting to make the right into the concrete madness where every Escalade was honking at every Range Rover, every woman, her windows down, yelling at another, “Are you leaving?”

Larissa flipped her turn blinker, revving the engine to straight. She’d find another supermarket. She could just see herself getting knocked down by the crazy fur-clad lady in a green Hummer.

Trouble was, she didn’t know where else to go because she always went to King’s on Main. It was seven minutes from her house, two lights and a right, and had all the things she needed. The no hassle was important. Larissa worked very hard to make her life hassle-free, which is why the cast on the leg cast a pall on her otherwise sunny life. Was the broken leg the atom swerving its own way?

She decided to drive down Main Street to Madison, the next small town over, to find a supermarket there. It was only thirteen minutes away.

Over lunch last week at Neiman’s Café, Maggie had asked her, “If you could be any person in the world, who would you be?” and Larissa had answered one question with two: “Forever? Or just for a little while?”

“Does it make a difference?”

“Yes,” Larissa said. “If it’s just for a little while, I’d like to be a hundred different people. If it’s forever, then no one. I don’t want anyone else’s life forever.”

They’d spent the rest of the blissful lunch thinking of who they’d like to be. Someone else other than us, Larissa concluded, because I want to know what it’s like to live a life as far away from my own as possible, and Maggie, all mischievous eyes, had said, “Larissa, you are living a life as far away from your own as possible.”

Maggie was right. Summit was already someone else’s life, thought Larissa as she drove slowly, gaping at the little shops along the hectic business district, looking for a supermarket. She could’ve easily become a professional protester with Che, maybe gone to the Philippines with her. Larissa was already far removed from her very self. Maybe that’s why she wasn’t reading.

Oh, excuses, excuses. As many as the day was long.

She had asked Jared if he would want to be someone else, and he said cheerfully without a moment’s thought: Robert Neville in I Am Legend . Larissa thought it was such an odd thing for her husband to wish for. “Completely alone in the world,” Jared explained, “trying to eke out a meager survival, hoping to stay alive till daylight because bad things that wanted to suck out your soul came for you in the night. I would want to be a vampire hunter. With silver in my pocket. Just for one day .” And then he mad-jigged in his underwear through the bedroom.

On her left Larissa spied a “Grand Opening” sign for a Super Stop&Shop. She smiled (because Asher called the chain Stupid Stop&Shop) and flicked on her turn signal, waiting patiently for the oncoming traffic to pass.

This lot was spacious and empty. She parked over by the griffin trees. Through the chain link fence in front of her lay a small local cemetery. Tall granite tombstones were haphazardly spaced out amid the slushy ground, black on white. As she took the keys from her ignition and grabbed her purse, climbing out of her shiny Escalade, she remembered! Not all of it, not even the gist of it, but the heart of it, the Dalloway quote. Something about Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then: “…that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”

She needed to buy only a few things; why was she still stumbling around the store thirty-five minutes later? After school today, Asher had an orthodontist appointment and a guitar lesson. And Emily had cello and voice. How did Larissa manage to allow the last few minutes of her afternoon to be vacuumed into aisles of self-rising flours and Cajun spices and new milk bones for Riot, into mozzarella cheese and new yogurt with antibiotic properties, which apparently she couldn’t live without? There were only three cashiers working, and one of them was on break, just leaving, or just coming back, i.e., incredibly slow. Larissa’s ankle felt sore, swollen. She couldn’t even muster a tight smile for the chronologically impaired cashier who looked all of twelve and wasn’t smiling much herself.

“Cash back?”

“What?” Larissa’s teeth were jammed together.

“Would you like some cash back?”

“No. No, thank you.” I’d like thirty minutes of my life back, can you do that?

A full fifty minutes after she walked through Stop&Shop’s automatic doors, she slid out of the automatic doors, leaning on the grocery cart for support. It was cold, her coat was unbuttoned, her capri-style sweats fit over the boot-cast but also bared her good ankle. She had forgotten the scarf, the gloves. What might it be like to stick her wet tongue on the metal handles of the cart, she wondered, as she pushed it slowly across the parking lot. And what if her tongue got stuck? She and Che used to do that when they were kids. The image of herself—nearly forty, limping, freezing cold, coat opened, shirt too thin, six bags of food in front of her, on a sub-zero January weekday bent over with her wet tongue crazy-glued to the steel handlebars—made Larissa laugh.

Her face still bearing the lines of the smile, she inched past a young man sitting astride a shiny flash motorcycle, about to pull a helmet over his ears. He wore the motorcycle. Brown leather jacket, jeans, black boots. The helmet was metallic silver, to not match the burnt yellow and black of the bike. He smiled at her.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

Larissa looked for her car. Flustered by her idiotic thoughts and her vapid grin, she tried to cover it up with a shrug, and a “Oh, nothing,” grimace now frozen on her face, morphing into polite stranger nod. He spoke again. “You’re a trooper, walking around in a cast. Need help?”