Leopoldine Core - When Watched - Stories

She walks to her apartment and passes a couple. All she hears the man say is “There are two types of people,” and instantly she hates him.

On her stoop there is a group of drunk teenagers smoking cigarettes. “You can’t sit here,” she announces, clutching her brown bag of groceries. “You have to leave.”

One woman says “Cunt,” under her breath. Another says “Bitch,” loudly. They all leave and she puts her key in the lock. I used to smoke cigarettes, she thinks, moving into the building. I used to be a teenager. Now I’m a Bitch and a Cunt.

Upstairs she gives herself an orgasm. The sun is setting. The window is open wide. Red light pours over the room. She rolls onto her side and imagines the man and his daughter eating dinner. She thinks that she would be happy just to fuck him once. She thinks that it isn’t true what people say about men, how they are dying to fuck all the time. She thinks that men are in fact a little prudish, hard to get in the sack.

She reflects, though, that she wouldn’t be happy to fuck him just once. She loves this man. And if they fucked she would say it. Almost against her will, she would say, “I love you.” She pictures him saying it back. “I love you. I’ve always loved you.” Then his face disintegrates.

She grows anxious. She thinks of all the pressures assigned to a person who is loved. She thinks that certainly if he loved her, it would be because he didn’t really know her. It would be because she was hiding certain hideous qualities. And it would only be a certain amount of time before these qualities surfaced. Soon he would know that she couldn’t drive. He would also know that even while walking or riding her bike, she often had no idea where she was going. He would know that she couldn’t give directions to tourists. He would make fun of me, she thinks and cries a little.

He would also discover that she had no urge for cleanliness, that in fact she must force herself to clean her apartment. That when she does not force herself, the kitchen quickly gets filthy, with mice walking idly across the counter, like it is their home. And the truth is that she doesn’t really mind it this way. If I never had anyone over, she thinks, it would always be filthy . She is amazed by people who clean compulsively. These people happily call themselves freaks and she hates them for it. Because she knows who the real freak is: the slob.

There is also the issue of her body. If he loved her it would be because he hadn’t seen all of her. It would be because they had fucked in a certain dim honeyed light the first few times. Then, gradually, as they fucked more and more, he would start to notice all the small ugly things. And with each discovery he would stare in silence, weighing his love against the new offense.

She wonders if Becky said anything to her father after they walked away. She wonders if Becky said, “That woman is weird,” or simply, “I don’t like her.” These visualizations produce panic. It seems to her that a lot of men care what their children say these days. It was not like this when she was a child. Her father preferred when she did not speak; and often when she did speak, he would act as if she had not, humming to himself.

I was a child so long ago, she thinks. She thinks that it isn’t true what people say about time, that it’s fast. Because time has felt fat to her. Every minute has been like a steak passing slowly through space. And she is tired. Tired of wading through the lard of her lifetime, the minutes and the hours.

She thinks of the man on the street who said, “There are two types of people.” She still hates him. She hates the way people in her neighborhood seem to lecture each other on dates. But she thinks now that the man is right, there are two types of people. There are the people who wake up afraid, she thinks. And her mother is this way, puttering around nervously at seven a.m. Then there are the people who are afraid at night. Afraid to sleep. She is this way.

It’s not her creaking ceiling that she fears or the shadows that have begun pooling on the floor. Because she is no longer in the room. She’s in a canoe with a hole in it. She watches the water pour in and realizes she’s dreaming. Then she wakes herself up, jerking with a snort.

This happens several more times. She wipes the drool from her mouth. Why won’t I let myself dream? she thinks with a chill. She senses, as she has sensed before, that there is something she doesn’t want to know about herself. Something that the goblins of her subconscious know.

She rolls onto her side. With one ear pressed to the pillow she can hear her heart beating. The more aware of it she becomes, the louder it gets. And time is waddling by. The minutes are chubby and endless.

She decides that she would be a whole other person if the man were there beside her. She would be serene, weak and pink with sex. The air between them would sing as they stared at each other. And when the light went out she would not lie awake. She would sleep.

“You’re going to miss that faculty dinner,” Susan said to Henry and he frowned in agreement. The van was packed, but two days later than planned. It was Thursday and they were finally pulling away from their Tribeca home and heading to Missoula, Montana, where Henry had been invited to teach poetry for the semester.

Susan looked out her window at the bright winter sky. “We packed too many books,” she said.

“That’s good. We might become other people,” Henry said — already he was speeding. “And who knows what they’ll want to read.”

Susan hummed appeasingly. She was a poet too, but she wouldn’t be teaching that semester. She planned to write.

Both of them had heard such wonderful things about Missoula, how the mountains looked purple just before sundown and choirs of coyotes sang into the night. But the hell of packing had sapped much of that first excitement. The drive would take at least three days and already they were exhausted.

Henry yawned. He had just turned seventy. He had a long face, a thin, constant grin surrounded by stubble. He wore thick black rectangular specs and a plaid wool button-down with a moth hole near the collar.

Susan leaned her head on his shoulder. She did this all the time.

Henry had thin, puny shoulders and Susan’s head was heavy. But he had never in all their forty-two years said so. He was just glad it was her head. Out of everyone in the world, Susan was the one mucking around in his life, routinely pissing him off. It could have been a lot of other women, he thought to himself, a few females spilling through his mind. Nope. It was Susan! Of course it was.

Like magic Susan lifted her head off his shoulder and stared out the window. Henry glanced at her and grinned. At sixty-six, Susan had become thinner — more frail, with bright streaks of white in her hair. What would I do without her? he thought, knowing full well that this sort of thinking was a two-headed beast. Just as he was quietly loving her, he was also manipulating himself into it. But he didn’t mind. The love came.

Henry pulled into the first gas station he saw and a pimpled attendant in a red vest walked up. The guy stared, then tapped on the glass. Henry rolled down his window. “Yes?”

“You know we have full service,” the guy said, pointing.

Henry cut his eyes and stared. “Yes I do know that.”

“Okay.” The guy shrugged and walked away.

“Ageist little twerp,” Henry said, rolling up his window. “I can walk for Christ’s sake.”

“People have treated me like that my whole life,” Susan huffed. “Always assuming I need help . Now that you’re old you’re getting a taste of what it’s like,” she said with a wry smile, “to be female.”