Peter Orner - Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge

Call these the meditations of an overweight junior lifeguard watching an empty lake, up in this chair lording over nobody. The last swimmer gave it up hours ago, late-afternoon September, the day gray and lingering. The lake is nearly motionless. The waves curdle up the shore like frosting. I think of what it might be like to actually have something to do. Guard, my child. Oh, guard, my daughter, oh, guard, do something, do something — and so, stiffen the sinews, summon the blood, dishonor not my mother. Into the breach I catapult, out past the buoys designating the authorized swimming area, and execute the Lost Buddy Drill, except this time there’s a body. I dive down, down, counting 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and I feel my way in the dark water, across the smooth, scalloped bottom of the lake, and search for an obstruction, the soft inert peacefulness of the drowned. Come up, breathe. Do it again. Count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and all I want is to feel flesh, all I want is to break the surface with the booty, haul in the girl alive — alert the media — as people, my people, watch from the beach. Hail the chubby Adonis. No one will drown on his watch. This job — and how much else? — is one long unrescue. I’m in charge of the blind sand, of the lake, my lake, now churning, now seething, as the wind picks up, as the gray day lingers.

MILLARD’S BEACH, 1986

She completed the forms and submitted them, along with a thick sheaf of notarized documentation. Long hours of doing what she had always done followed. Days of the same. Work: cleaning, cooking, marketing, washing, reading, teaching, correcting, preparing lessons. But really what Maritsa was doing was waiting, so even what was the same took longer now. One day she burned her maps in the oven, watched them ignite through the greasy little window. Still, she was waiting. Then the idea of hoping (because what is hoping if it isn’t waiting?) became so abruptly foreign it scared her. She didn’t need it anymore. The embassy of the United States had sent her a stamped paper.

Maritsa used to place her hands over America. Even with her fingers spread, she couldn’t cover it all. Michigan’s flat hat, Florida’s backward chicken leg. California always longer than her own thumb.

She took her seven-year-old, Damyan, and renamed him Danny, although she insisted that his name would always be Damyan. He didn’t mind. SWAT teams and Chicago Bears, the boy couldn’t get enough. Her husband, Lyubomir, stayed behind in Sophia. He was a doctor and he had to close his affairs as well as transfer their tiny, despised flat. Of course, he wasn’t going to be a doctor any more than she was going to be the schoolteacher she had spent the last twelve years of her life waking up and being. And what are they going to think of me there, my English being so atrocious? They’ll think I’m illiterate, a moron.

“And Damyan? You’ll steal his chance?”

“Don’t hide behind the boy. It’s you—”

So she left Lyubomir, and for months, the two of them sent letters back and forth across the ocean. In one letter, his pen ripped through the paper. He wrote that he had become a man with a wife who insisted the only way to leave a flat she hated was to move to America! Maritsa replied: It isn’t the flat, it’s everything. It’s the neighbors, it’s the Dancescus flushing, it’s the snoring, it’s Razvan and Sabina’s fucking we have to listen to. Can’t you understand that people shouldn’t have to live like this — especially now? And always, Damyan. The unimaginable opportunity. Damyan the American! What lies! And I’m a man who let it happen! They laugh at me, don’t you see, Maritsa? They’re all laughing.

And some nights he’d wake her up just before dawn, a call they couldn’t afford, and pant into the phone like an exhausted horse.

When she felt confident enough with her spoken English (she’d studied it for years, but talking to Americans was another matter altogether), she finally told the kind, stubby-fingered man at the gas station grocery who she was and what she was doing here. He spat laughter, not cruelly, only in shock: A refugee? To Waukegan? This armpit? Come on, love, sell me something else.

Well, not a refugee in a technical sense, but she didn’t want to explain her classification and the label made it easier. She’d won a lottery and the INS placement office in Washington, D.C., had found her an apartment in what was left of this city on Lake Michigan, too far from Chicago to say she lived in Chicago.

She got a job with a maid service. Every morning she and three other women were driven in a van to clean houses in Lake Forest. Lake Forest! Now here was America! Her first morning in the van, another girl, a Jamaican, had nudged her and said, “You won’t believe me.”

“What?”

“The women, they clean the houses before we get there.”

“What?”

“Not a joke. They clean like lunatics, these women. Oh, you’ll scrub their crap inside the toilet bowls, yes, and worse, but a lot of the work is already done before you walk in the house with the bucket.”

Cleaning for the cleaning ladies. Maritsa found this preposterous lie to be absolutely true. So it wasn’t the work that was difficult. It was only that these houses, houses as big as banks she roamed around with her tank-sized vacuum cleaner, sapped her energy in other, less definable ways. It was a kind of fatigue. She’d never imagined that proximity to wealth, unfathomable wealth, could make her so weary. She found herself not even wanting it anymore.

English classes were held Tuesday and Thursday nights at the local grammar school. She sat squeezed, her knees jammed against the bottom of a tiny desk, and repeated after the teacher, whose name was Gilda Petrocelli. Not Mrs. Petrocelli or even Mrs. Gilda, only Gilda, and she had fat pink cheeks that made her look like a talking porcelain doll. She also had a husband who kept constant watch, prowling outside class, stalking the little halls like a giant in squeaky shoes. Often Gilda’s husband stuck his face in the narrow, crisscrossed wire window and breathed until it fogged. It was hard to tell if the husband’s problem was anger or sorrow or fear. Gilda had told the class that before she began teaching Advanced ESL, she’d been a librarian. But that’s all in the past now, she said. She said it like all that cataloging and shelving had been like fighting in some forgotten war. And maybe it had been. Teaching school had certainly been like that. Those terrible dangling feet, every morning those pairs of relentlessly staring eyes. Gilda was particularly concerned about pronunciation. She always spent the last five minutes simply saying whatever words came to her, in alphabetical order. Pronunciation holds the key, she’d say, grinning and holding up a cardboard cutout with a drawing of an old-fashioned skate key, to successful integration. These are words you know, but you must master how they sound . She spoke slowly, enunciating every syllable, directing them to watch her mouth.

Appetite. Butcher. Curriculum. Despondent. Evaporate.

At night she’d coo to her sleeping Damyan, but really more to herself, that where you are is in your mind, that it’s got nothing to do with maps. That if you aren’t in Waukegan in your mind, you aren’t there. Do you hear me, little man? This isn’t Waukegan, it’s the Horn of Plenty…

October and she’d walk the wet streets to the gas station grocery for sliced cheese and a magazine. She’d look at the potholes full of oily water and the broken windows of the abandoned paint factory that stretched three city blocks. The buildings of Sophia were beautiful in their corruption; headless, handless statues gazed down from countless ledges. Her city was streets of crumble and scaffolds. True, there were newer buildings in Sophia, cheap flimsy apartment blocks built in a day and a half, like the box she’d moved into after she got married, but she didn’t think of these when she thought of the architecture of home. In Waukegan, the buildings were not new and not old, and no one bothered to say anything about them one way or the other. They’d been built to endure and then were just left.