Anna Noyes - Goodnight, Beautiful Women

I was convinced the mother-stranger riffling through her pockets for her ticket was once beautiful. Why else be ashamed of that smile? It suited the rest of her now, but she hid it from habit. Mom once had the trappings of beauty in a replicable way — fake nails, bleach blonde hair, thick makeup. Fresh from the shower she looked frightened and alien, her face like an underdeveloped Polaroid.

She moved on to tearing apart her backpack, an enormous, camo-patterned thing with a frame, and still she couldn’t come up with the receipt, so she began unpacking carefully folded undershirts, underpants, and balls of yellow socks, stacking them in the center isle. It was winter, and the aisle was gritty, and wet with slush. Two plastic bags, one full of sandwiches, one full of orange peels. A handful of tissues. One of the sock balls rolled away from her, disappearing under the seats.

“That’s it,” she said, raising her voice, “that and feminine stuff, which stays in the bag. I bought a ticket, in Bangor, like I told you. You don’t remember me? Not one of you remembers?” And then she was talking at all of us, and we stopped watching her and pretended to be occupied with our magazines or the view of the parking lot. “You, sir,” she said, pointing. “I sat right there in front of you. Tell the driver.” But the man said nothing.

I raised my hand. “I saw her,” I said.

“Well, why the heck didn’t you say so earlier?” she asked. “But thank you. Thank you, sweetheart.”

Now that she was one of us again, a lady leaned over in her seat to help her collect her clothes from the aisle.

“I need some air, sir,” the woman said.

“Ma’am, we’re behind schedule as is,” said the bus driver, wheezing his way back to his seat, cheeks pinked.

“Listen now, everyone else on this bus got to get off and breathe a sec while I was fussing with you. I need to stretch my legs.” So the doors thwacked open, and the cold air came pouring in, and he left the doors open like he was proving something while she paced the parking lot, throwing punches, stretching like a boxer. When she lifted her arms over her head I glimpsed her stomach, bisected by a scar.

“I’m sitting with the nice one,” she said when she reboarded. I moved my purse from the seat beside me. I couldn’t possibly look at her face this close up. She smelled both animal and floral.

“Here,” she said. “Have some nice potpourri, homemade by my ma.” What I thought were orange peels were orange rose petals, stuffed in a sandwich bag. She crushed the bag against my chest and I thanked her, dreading the thought of her smell leaching into my things.

It was three o’clock, but nearly dark outside, and the bus headlights sparkled against the ice-encased birches. Whole swaths of trees were bowed down with the weight of the ice, like a forest in the wake of a nuclear blast.

“Little of this too?” she said, reaching into her long, deep pocket, pulling out a fifth of Coffee Brandy. I was already tipsy. Gray took me to Ruby Tuesday’s before the bus stop. He bought me two coral-colored drinks to celebrate my trip, peach schnapps something with fruit bits floating in it. I was afraid the bus driver would catch us and kick us both off the bus, but I was even more afraid of her. I took the bottle in the darkness, toasted to my mother, and drank.

Mom used to park the car in the driveway and drink. Watching the house, watching me jump on the trampoline. When she drove away and didn’t come back Dad ripped off all his clothes and went running naked through the woods, branches cutting him up. After that he joined a Christian cult where the men wore bowler hats and the women wore dresses made from curtains and listening to the radio was forbidden. He told me I was a sinner, and I moved in with my grandfather. I played the radio all night under my covers.

I used to see Mom everywhere, blonde hair swishing through crowds away from me. She sent me postcards from Tallahassee and Honolulu, from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. All they said was “I love you.” One day the postcards stopped. The military had discharged her for bad conduct. She just disappeared. At the playground behind my house I crawled into strange women’s laps, snuck into their brood of children, slipped my hand, unnoticed, into theirs. I can remember how the startled mothers’ expressions rearranged when they discovered it was my hand they held — a look of pity mixed, consistently, with repulsion. No one wants a changeling.

Buses got me thinking. I closed my eyes and pictured Gray and me in a bath together, lit candles and peace of mind. I’d grown up to be a real woman. And then I pictured my secret self, a self that diminished and diminished until I didn’t exist at all, and I had no one to love. My face turned gaunt and sallow. I stopped looking in mirrors.

“All these fancy folks,” she said, “and nobody notices me. Isn’t that the way. Well, you must be a good looker.” She leaned in close, and I looked at her through the darkness, headlights sweeping her face.

“I mean, what do these people know? I’ve got a sick ma, I spend all Christmas trying to get her out of that darned trailer, come up to Boston with me. I’m just trying to get me some sleep on this bus, and this world’s just got to stick its finger in it. You know what I mean.”

I wanted to tell her she was loud, that people were looking, that we might get caught, but I was too nervous around her to think. I swallowed more brandy. My mouth was dry.

“Your mom’s sick?” I said.

“Sick as they come.”

We passed the brandy back and forth, sweet as syrup, and I drank each time she passed it to me against my better judgment, even though better judgment reigned in my life at that time, an organizing principle that seemed to make my decisions for me. After the first couple swallows the brandy no longer made me gag, and this is it, I thought, the moment when I cross to the other side of the mirror, to a path where leaving Gray was inevitable and I could get trashed on a bus with this mother, who drained the bottle and slipped her hand into mine.

“Where you wanna sleep?” she slurred when the bus pulled into South Station. They were unloading suitcases, and I spotted mine, blue with a bright-pink luggage tag, pulled to the curb. It was strange to see my pink tag, bought special for this trip, and it reminded me of so much that already seemed far behind me: Gray, the nursing conference, my booked hotel room, my home. I tripped down the aisle. I could barely move my legs. In those days I was one of those drinkers who could usually conceal their drunkenness. I was going to say drunks, but I’m not.

“I’m no dyke or anything,” she said, jamming her hands into her back pockets, rocking on her heels. “But if you need a place to land, you’re welcome.”

“I shouldn’t,” I said.

“Who’s judging?”

“You got a nice place?” She grabbed my bag from me and wheeled it through the station. I wondered who was watching us, but no one was. Most city people are hardly ever watching. I took out my cell phone and fumbled with it, thinking I should do something about Gray, but she was charging ahead of me. I didn’t want to lose sight of her hunting hat in the crowd, and anyway my eyes couldn’t focus on the text message from Gray that was up on the screen. I closed one eye, trying to read. Gray would call me seven times that night, wanting to know I made it in safe. He’d call the hotel, growing frantic when they said I never checked in. The next morning I’d try to soothe with half-truths: how I ran into an old friend, went out drinking, slept over. It all sounded blatantly like an affair.

We waited together on the subway platform, beside a movie poster where someone had blacked out all the actors’ eyes with marker. The cool, acrid breeze of the approaching train blew our hair.