Sara Majka - Cities I've Never Lived In - Stories

I tried to figure out the story about the man when I was lying in bed, tired from waitressing, but I drifted off and turned the television to a crime drama. In those dramas the lost person was always found or the crime solved. Occasionally a story wouldn’t be solved, but only because it was part of a larger narrative that would be solved later. The curious thing, though, was that the solving, while mandatory, was the least interesting part of the show. I watched an endless number of episodes and for years cut clippings from newspapers about lost people. The real life stories — those newspaper clippings — never let me down, whether they were solved or unsolved. The details were too beautiful. Too etched in. Each person had only that one time to be lost, while the writers of the dramas wrote a new episode each week.

I left the story with the man from the island stealing a car. He drove to New Hampshire and stayed in abandoned houses. He wandered the houses and one day found a full closet and traded his coat for a warmer one. He also pocketed some old photographs. When the cold became unbearable, he drove to a shelter. Nothing after that, no more mention of him. He was simply in line for the shelter. Later a body was found in a lake with the warmer coat on and several photographs in a plastic bag. The owner of the coat and photographs was found alive. He couldn’t account for the body in the lake — he didn’t know anyone who was missing. Then he remembered his parents’ home, left empty, and drove there with the officer, where they found a strange coat and pieced together what happened. As if finding a coat were finding a person. Maybe by saying it here, I can stop with that story. So often stories don’t work.

It’s quite a thing to think about, my mother said. She was visiting from the Cape. The subletter had left weeks earlier and my mother was staying in his room. He had moved out when I was away, leaving only a necklace pinned to the wall. It was a tiny room. My mother sat on the bed while I sat on the floor. She looked around and said it reminded her of when we had lived on the island. There was a place where we could pick grapes, she said. I was pregnant with you that summer, and I thought all the time about how you would be able to pick grapes.

I talked about the restaurant, my worry that it wasn’t going to last the winter. That it had been my plan to save thirty thousand dollars to have a baby, but now there weren’t enough customers.

Thirty thousand dollars wouldn’t have paid for a baby, she said.

I know, I said.

The next morning I put cream and sugar on the table while my mother started the percolator. I told her I had dreamed that night about returning to Berlin, and she asked if I remembered Poland. All that way, she said, and you didn’t leave the hotel. There’s no reason to believe things will always go that way, I said.

We left the house for the Neue Galerie to meet up with a friend of hers. We looked at the work of an artist who painted the same lover over a period of twenty years. He had been married and never painted the wife. He was from Belgium, or a similar country, and to be in rooms with his large paintings was to be surrounded by the inner world of a man I didn’t know. My mother spoke little over lunch, so I talked with her friend Robin. She wore a broad scarf around her shoulders. I was glad that my mother had never resorted to scarves. We talked about art and travel while my mother drank coffee and picked at her cake. Afterward, after saying good-bye to the woman and getting on the train, I was exhausted.

And the art, you liked it? my mother asked.

I felt bad for the wife, I said.

It’s not easy for anyone, is it? she said. You liked Robin, though, you got along well with her?

You were quiet, I said.

I don’t know why.

The art?

Sometimes I wonder if you would have been happier with someone like her.

She didn’t mean it as a question. She said it to herself, looking out the window, and I didn’t respond. I was thinking of the man who had spent all those years painting the lover and never once the wife.

That Saturday the man at the market had clams. There, my mother said, as she stepped forward and bought two dozen. At home, I scrubbed clams and put them on a towel, while she opened a bottle of chardonnay we had bought at the discount store. The wine tasted of pear juice. She was leaving the next morning. We sat at the table in the fading light and I tried to talk about Richard, put in mind of him, I think, by the clams, and the cold, and of having my mother there, and of having her about to go.

When I had spent the winter in Provincetown — it was when my marriage was ending and a painting friend had offered her cottage cheaply — I used this friend’s license to clam every Sunday, going at first out of curiosity, and then because I loved it, and then after that, when the wind became bitter, the clams scarce, the ice on the jetty treacherous, simply because I didn’t know what else to do.

Much of my money that winter went to the heating bill and food and beer at the Governor Bradford, which wasn’t cheap — nothing in Provincetown was cheap, though it seemed like there were only seven of us staying for the winter, and none of us had any money. Everything should have been given away. I didn’t bring my computer, but I did bring pens and my notebook, which more than leading to creating anything, mostly helped alleviate the panic that I wasn’t creating. The Stop & Shop was two miles away and I’d walk with my backpack and come home to cook lunch, and perhaps I’d write something or sketch with my friend’s supplies. Afternoons I’d walk until stopping to have a drink at the Governor Bradford. There weren’t happy hour specials in Provincetown, but being in New York had put me in the habit of drinking at dusk. Then at night I’d listen to the radio or read the Times or fiction from the library.

I didn’t get along with the bartender at the Governor Bradford. She stiffened when I came in and was slow to greet me. At first she had been easy with me — probably thinking I was a tourist there for only a week — and told me stories about herself and the area. When she had learned that I researched stories she asked what they were about. I tried to think of something that would be easy to describe, and I talked about a girl who had gone missing from the pier in Portland. The bartender froze in place. She said, Several of my friends left here and walked off the pier. I thought of the pier, two dark blocks from the bar, how you could hear and feel the ocean and what it must have felt like.

I went to the Governor Bradford most nights until Richard came to visit and then my habits changed. We were happy then — during those two weeks — and switched to a bar across the street where younger locals went, and day trippers, and professionals from neighboring towns. There was a raw bar and microbrews, and it was warm and nice to sit by the window and eat oysters.

In the cottage, we fell in together as easily as if we were still married, when we used to stay out late and sleep until noon and play records from bed. He would lie there, one hand lifting records from the floor and putting them on the player, which was also on the floor and covered with dust, so all our record players — and we went through a lot of them back then — played too slowly. In Provincetown, he lay there while I sat and smoked and watched out the window, talking to him, telling him stories about my childhood. I touched his back tentatively, unsure of what I wanted. He didn’t move, either toward me or away. We might have been drinking the night before. He was not a big drinker, but there were a few nights he was hungover and slower in the morning. I wondered if I was mistaking his slowness for intimacy.