Straight into a whole new life.
Someone could drive straight down to Hermosillo, Mexico from here. Keep heading south. Far as you wanted. Maybe all the way to Belize. Straight into a whole new life.
WALKING AWAY BY DEAC ETHERINGTON 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 127
She had dyed her hair the night before, mixing blue streaks in blonde. But he wanted her to change it back by dinner. They were having the boss over to celebrate his promotion at Hughes Missile Systems and he didn’t want anything untoward about the impression they made. Which included her hair.
Driving to Safeway she glanced at the grocery list on her phone. He’d decided that, too. Roast lamb and gorgonzola beet salad. Even though she told him three weeks ago that she had stopped eating meat.
She slowed down for a prison work crew on the road. Several white vans with sauntering guards. Convicts in orange pants cutting weeds. She thought of waving but decided waving at men who were incarcerated was probably not appropriate.
By mid-morning she was back in the sunroom adjacent the courtyard patio of her beige house surrounded by dozens of other beige houses on a swathe of denuded desert in Tucson called Shangri-La Vistas. Your Dream Come True, said the copper saguaro sign at the entrance.
Wearing her cheetah yoga pants and Runaways T-shirt, she straddled the exercise bike. For weeks she had been sculpting her thighs for the trip to Hawaii she expected to win from Amway. She believed she wanted this more than anything else in the world. So she lowered her head and began peddling the bike that never moved with a rising ferocity that never mattered.
After college she had leveraged her psychology degree into a job behind the cosmetics counter at Nordstrom. Which was the sort of place a psychology degree was surprisingly handy.
One day, just as her job was threatening to slip into a life-choice, he came gliding into the department store with his blue eyes and moussed hair and just the right amount of beard stubble. He leaned across her counter and asked after the menswear department. Then he asked for her number. He was the leading edge of everything she had always been told she wanted.
Being older made him a novelty. He moved through rooms with the kind of confidence that created its own breeze, his good looks teetering between vigorous middle-age swarthy and creeping old man flesh-sag. It was easy, in the beginning, to ignore the flesh-sag. Or at least to re-label it as character lines.
Like on the day he stood at the bow of a sailboat they chartered in San Carlos, Mexico, posing for the camera in a slice of sunlight with a blazing smile. A moment when anything seemed possible. But that was only a camera click. Now his stomach stressed the buttons of his short-sleeve dress shirts with pocket protectors and he smelled like closet. He had a bathroom cabinet full of hair-loss products and he spent all of his free time in their climate-controlled garage with his collector car and a mini-fridge of craft IPAs.
They got married because she was pregnant. They told themselves there were lots of other reasons too. Like how they were soulmates and everything. But it was because she was pregnant.
They moved into Shangri-la Vistas where he bought her a Tesla with a baby seat. Gave her a list of foods she could eat. Then another list of exercises graded by trimester. He edited the music on her phone to eliminate songs he considered too aggressive in utero. Like her entire riot-girl collection, from Bikini Kill to Skating Polly. She kept focusing on the camera click on the bow of a boat that neither of them could sail. Then she miscarried in the bathroom of a convenience store next to the Desert Tire Emporium.
She picked up the TV remote from the cup holder of the exercise bike. The TV was pre-tuned to a show called Fangs on the Nature Channel. The only station he watched. It was mostly about gazelles running for their lives in Africa. Or sharks tearing apart baby seals. She rooted for the gazelles and seals, even though it was hopeless. Right now, a cheetah was gaining ground on a kudu in the Serengeti. She thought how there was no corner of the horizon that this cheetah could not reach. How its strides actually defined the horizon for itself.
She pedaled harder, the bike lurching from side to side in the confines of the sunroom.
Since his promotion he’d been adamant about a baby. He didn’t want to be the 60-year-old dad at the middle-school soccer game. Actually, he’d be more like the 70-year-old dad. But that was splitting hairs.
After these conversations she always retreated into the low-lit pastel interiors of her development house. Furniture arranged in conversant crescents on soft carpets. A living room no-one actually did any living in. Window blinds permanently drawn against the sun. Not a sound except for the hum of the air-conditioning. It was an atmosphere for displaying caskets. She receded into the shadows of these rooms and waited for him to disappear into the garage with his buffing cloth.
Just as the cheetah caught the kudu in a flurry of dust and fur, there was a flash of orange on the patio wall. Then a man in orange pants flailing in her bougainvillea bushes like a flipped crab. He was from the prison work crew.
The man turned toward the patio door and looked directly at her. A big smile spread across his face in a leisurely way. The line of his perfect white teeth broken by a single gold incisor on the top row. His blondish hair more hacked than cut. Eyes very blue next to the bougainvillea blossoms…
“Hope I didn’t startle you, ma’am.” He spoke loud enough for her to hear through the glass. “It’s just that I found myself suddenly short of options.”