John Domini - Highway Trade and Other Stories

Over one shoulder she spies one she knows, one that surely even the villagers would remember. A girl in a red cap and cloak, carrying a basket. Just visible as she ducks into the forest. Maria can’t let this one get away, she’s off at a run, hollering for help from her college roommate. For isn’t this junior year abroad? And isn’t there someone else who can help, a friend of her roommate, a pretty Irish boy? She hollers for him too, making wild promises if only he’ll come. But then, oh. Then, running, she sees them both — her roommate and the Irish boy. Oh! They’ve shrunk to something even smaller and easier to lose, they’re no more than fireflies in the forest dusk. She had a friend for life and a boy who loved her and yet now she can only catch a last flickering glimpse of them before she comes up against the wolf. The wolf, its breath stinking of bugs, its legs terrifying. Legs so tough and powerful that the chorus at the crossroads is suddenly nothing by comparison; they’re a sham; there can be no other, standing at the crossroads.

“This is growth,” Inksa said. “The fairy tale, the old magic. This always indicates greater maturity.”

“Rich stuff, Mary,” Teri said. Her voice too was soft.

“Rich, yah.”

“Mary? This makes your last one look like one of those antidrug comics for children.”

One or two others chuckled, but not Mary. She was still swallowing wetly, blinking in spasms.

“And in this one again we see the subject of loss.” Inksa sounded warmer than Mary would have thought possible. “Insofar as we may psychoanalyze, here, I would say that this is what I see. Your loss.”

The last word was almost a whisper, a caress. Still Mary couldn’t look at her. Once more she stood at the bay window, actually propped against the window, her hot forehead working against the glass. She knuckled her face. Midway through her turn someone had touched her, tried to put an arm around her, and at that Mary had erupted from her seat.

The next to break the silence was Lavender. “I can’t leave it at that. Not after all we’ve been through.”

Mary felt the response in the windowpane, a rowdy vibration. Today the circle had passed on acting ladylike.

“I mean you know I love Mary,” Lavender went on. “We all love Mary. But that dream, it’s a manifesto.”

What? Bouts of grief like these still left Mary empty, thoughtless. That was the wolf, or that was one of them — a sadness that devoured her brains first.

“Haven’t we been asking where we go from here? Haven’t we? Mary, you’re so evolved. That dream is a manifesto.”

It took Mary a long shut-eyed moment just to recall that today too she’d asked to speak last. And till now the talk had concentrated more and more on a single issue. They’d wondered whether their circle were truly something formal and dedicated — truly a church. One of the others had dreamed of a Ukrainian Christmas egg, and that was how the women shared the idea, today: like something fragile, made by hand, and covered with cryptic designs. Mary in fact had taken the lead (she had? really? this sopping wreck?).

She had. She’d argued that Inksa hadn’t come all the way from The Hague just to arrange a little girl-talk. Mary had even opened up about her anger the day before. She’d warned everyone that she’d had another dream about Europe, then joked, Now don’t set me off again. Don’t start talking about bargain rates .

But what was this dyke behind her saying?

Mary jerked upright, stiffening. The anger. The anger again, bang on top of the grief. Behind her the other women chimed in after Lavender, before her the big windowpane shivered once more with the echo, and all Mary could think was a nasty pun: Good vibrations. Oh, wow . She shook her head. The Brooklyn woman was saying Mary’s dream felt like proof they had a church, a real church, because it connected them to ancient stories and patterns.

“Isn’t that a true faith?” she was asking. “One that encompasses both past and future?”

Mary thought: How about one that encompasses both weeping and insults? In the same minute? Oh, she was whirling. On top of everything else, she stood there as sleep-deprived as yesterday; last night she’d lain awake again. Now the ocean’s rise and fall, at the foot of her view, triggered a jaw-cracking yawn. Whirling.

Last night she’d even started worrying about work. She was stretching an already-extended leave from one of the State Senate offices. Then her thoughts had gone the opposite direction, back to the haunts of childhood insomnia: terrors about the size of the universe.

Teri was speaking now. “I think Mary’s dream reminds us that in order to go forward, first we have to go back.”

“There’s something I need to tell you about my mother,” Mary said. “Something about her dying.”

The only one she could look at was Teri.

“Your mother, Mary?” someone else asked. “Something personal? Aren’t you the one who’s been saying we have to get beyond the personal?”

“Hello?” Teri said.

“I was jealous of her,” Mary said. “Jealous of her dying.”

She kept her eyes on Teri. The old, heavy face hung low, halfway down in the well of the rocking chair. “Working with Mama day after day, working through all those stages. I started to think, now this is truly getting somewhere. This is truly — spiritual communion.”

“Ach, yah. The greatest challenge of the Demiurge.”

“The chill of eternity,” Teri said. “I’m with you.”

Mary was shaking her head, turning back towards the sun-flecked ocean. “No. No, I don’t think you’re with me. I think we’re all still only talking about ourselves.” The window held a faint reflection of the group. “We’re still just finding out about ourselves, the kind of women we are.”

“Oh now, Mary,” one of them said. “You’re not going to chide us again for making money?”

“All we’ve ever done,” Mary said, “is find out about ourselves. For us, our generation, even when a mother dies it’s only another book from the library. It’s only another set of steps to read about. It’s really about ourselves.” The surf’s noise, a static beneath her, had Mary thinking of the radio shows she’d called in to; she was on hold again, wondering what she’d say. “So many steps, so many movements. Once upon a time, we came clear across the country.”

“Hey, speak for yourself,” someone put in. “I was born in the Valley. Right in Four Corners.”

“We left everything,” Mary went on. “We crossed the country. As if all that mattered out there was ourselves.”

Teri: “Are we supposed to be virgins, Mary?”

She frowned. “I’m just saying, I think I’m saying — we aren’t the heros of this story. Not losers like us.”

After a long moment Inksa spoke up. At her coolest, her most Aryan, she pointed out that previous movements in fact provided a useful structural model. “The circle expands in this way too, via intrapersonal pyramiding. I must thank you, Mary, for the suggestion.”

“What? Thank me?” Mary couldn’t stop talking, she couldn’t let go of the floor, and she found herself apologizing, an old reflex. Sorry, guys. Teri came back with reassurances: It’s always good to hear what you think. Then somewhere in this old-shoe give and take, as if she and the others were ten years into a difficult marriage — in there, somewhere, Mary grew hot with the discovery of what she needed to say.

“Mama,” she said, “what Mama went through, she was a virgin.” She whipped round, scowling at lineup on the sofa. “At that we’re all virgins. Every time, we’re a virgin.”

The women before her retreated, sliding deeper into the noisy old leather.