Christopher Sorrentino - Trance

Myrna opens the front door and steps over the threshold. This is the time-tested way of assessing the weather. The weathermen get it wrong a lot, but the front step is right every time: a warm and cloudy day, absolutely. She goes back inside the house, heads for her bedroom at the end of the hall, listening for stirrings within the children’s rooms as she passes them. She selects a light blouse, off white with a red and black check, perfect for the warm day.

“It was funny the way the girl didn’t do it in a nasty way. She says, ‘The ones with the frosting? What you mean is the Cream Su— preme .’” Mary chuckles, reaching into a white pastry box to cut a pair of bloated doughnuts in two. One actually seems to burst when it is punctured by the knife, sighing and settling as it deflates, bleeding custard-colored filling. Around the two wounded doughnuts sits a selection of crullers and old-fashioneds. “I mean I didn’t know they had names, even. And I’ll tell you, it is so bad there on a Monday morning. Everybody in a hurry. Line going back to here. It has got to be easier for them if you refer to the pastries by their proper name rather than just pointing, this and this and one of this.”

“How was your Sunday with Jim?” asks Myrna. She is unwinding the cord from around her adding machine, which she prefers to Pastor Robert’s calculator. She likes to be able to consult the paper tape.

“He has all these extensions,” Mary says, her hand hovering over the box. She selects a glazed chocolate old-fashioned, a doughnut with some heft to it.

Rochelle is writing the church’s account number on the paper sleeves they roll the coins in. In about twelve seconds she will say, as she always does, that they should put in the account number ahead of time. Then she will empty out the cloth bag that contains the fifteen or twenty dollars in change the church received this week and begin to separate the coins.

“And how is your mother, Rochelle?” asks Myrna.

“She is OK,” says Rochelle, pausing. “I wanted to take her outside to feed the ducks after lunch but she wouldn’t eat lunch. I brought her a Quarter Pounder with cheese and she didn’t touch it.”

“How’s her mood?”

“She cried. All she does is cry and try to breathe.” Then Rochelle begins to cry herself. Myrna puts the adding machine down on the long folding table where she likes to work on collection deposit days. She walks over and puts both hands on Rochelle’s shoulders.

“It’s all right,” she says. “There, there.”

“I’m all right,” says Rochelle. “It’s just so sad.” She looks at the flattened paper sleeves before her and inhales deeply. “We ought to just put in these account numbers ahead of time. Save all this work.”

“Maybe,” says Myrna, happy to recite her part in the weekly litany, “you should just go ahead and write it in on some extra ones today.”

They go about their business. Mary, discomfited by Rochelle’s display, chatters nervously, forcing Myrna to add the receipts a fourth time. She likes the soft sound her fingertips make striking the keys of the machine. But she steals a glimpse at her wristwatch and sees that it is about twenty to nine. She can imagine the line at the bank first thing on a Monday, and she wants to arrive early. She asks Rochelle a question about her children’s doctor. This will quiet Mary down plus help to bring Rochelle back to the everyday, away from the awful place she inhabits alone with thoughts of her failing mother. Kill two birds with one stone. But especially quiet Mary down. As Myrna knows she will, Rochelle answers the question carefully. The doctor is a colleague, after all, of Trygve’s.

Mary finishes rolling the coins, and Myrna removes from the church secretary’s desk a canvas money pouch. The pouch says LOOMIS and has a zipper with a broken lock at one end. Myrna enjoys placing the money in this pouch so much. It makes the whole procedure extra significant somehow.

The three women leave the church building and walk to the parking lot under the broad eaves extending from the steeply gabled roof.

“Is it just me or—” says Rochelle, dabbing at her face with a Kleenex. She shouts over the noise as another jet from McClellan AFB rumbles into the sky overhead. She tries again.

“Is it just me, or is it hot? You certainly dressed right for the weather, Myrna.”

Myrna is pleased with this remark.

“I was saying to Jim just this morning that the temperature was starting to feel tolerable, but this is too much. Something is not right.” Mary sounds particularly adamant, as if she won’t be fooled.

Rochelle needs a lift home after the bank, so Mary says that if it’s OK with everybody can they just take one car to the bank and then she’ll just drop Myrna off back here? Of course they can. Mary just wants everyone to ride in her new Cutlass. However, Myrna is less than thrilled when in climbing into the back, she places the adding machine on the seat before sitting down herself and Mary says, “Please, dear, mind the upholstery.” She reminds herself not to be spiteful, to be a charitable adult who is aware of the many, many ways in which Mary fights her many, many weaknesses. But she can’t help herself, for she just has to say, as Mary is pulling out, “A new car somehow smells cheaper than it did when Trygve and I bought one two years ago. Or maybe it’s just the Oldsmobile, do you think?” and she is ashamed, especially when Mary lapses into a wounded silence that she sustains throughout the five-minute drive to Crocker Bank.

Mary turns into the bank’s driveway. The low structure is oriented lengthwise on its lot, and the building presents only its blankly decorative concrete walls to the street, its windows and entrances invisible to anyone passing on Marconi Avenue. Mary steers around the building’s pointed outcropping to park in one of the painted spaces near the bank’s entrance, joining several other cars there. Myrna checks her watch: 9:02.

“Look at them,” says Rochelle.

A small cluster of people are on the other side of the cyclone fence that surrounds the lot. One pushes his way through a large gap in the fence where its links have been cut and then holds aside the section of fence to allow the others through. In all, four figures climb into the bank lot. They wear heavy jackets and woolen watch caps.

“I thought I was hot,” Rochelle says, fanning herself.

“Maybe they were out hunting this morning,” says Mary. None of the women knows much about such things. The group of four begins advancing toward the entrance as the women get out of the Oldsmobile. Myrna carries her adding machine with her.

“You can leave that in the car,” says Mary.

“It’s all right,” says Myrna.

“I’m sorry,” says Mary. “I didn’t mean to be a so-and-so about it. A new car can make you into the nastiest so-and-so. I almost can’t wait until I put the first dent in it.”

“Or one of your kids does it for you,” says Rochelle.

“Amen to that,” says Myrna. Carl and Sonja both drive. Jon’s just learning. Her heart is in her mouth all the time now.

“Please don’t feel you have to carry it,” Mary says.

“I don’t mind. I’m already out.”

Mary reaches for Myrna and squeezes her wrist. Then the women head for the door, but here are the hunters — they’re young people, seemingly a little awkward in the presence of actual grown-ups, shuffling and avoiding eye contact, and Myrna is surprised when one of them reaches for the door and holds it open for the older women, making a stiff after-you gesture with his free hand. She smiles up at him and says, “Thank you.”

Inside a short line winds around the floor before the teller’s stations. Three butchers wearing yellow hard hats and long white bloodstained coats stand in line together, one leaning in toward the others confidentially, making compact motions with his hands as he tells a story. The three laugh quietly and then, the joke told, direct their attention toward the long counter and the tellers working behind it. A man stands filling out a deposit slip, and Myrna sees him pause, raising his right leg to scratch his left calf with the toe of his shoe. Rochelle fusses with the pouch for a moment, flipping through its contents with the fingers of one hand, checking.