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The Playground

Anne Turner Taub

    Marnie Brown sat on the park bench and watched the children playing on the swings. You don’t commit suicide because things are terrible. Things usually aren’t terrible. It’s just that you feel terrible about things. Jobs that never go anywhere, romances that never go anywhere, days after days that never go anywhere. It was not a bad life—it just didn’t go anywhere.
    She often went to the playground now. A last touch of real life before she entered that long dark tunnel with no end. She couldn’t help envying the mothers who sat in a row on the benches like the pigeons on wires above them and cooed to each other about toilet training and breast feeding. When it was time to go home to make dinner for their husbands, they flapped their wings for the children and left in a flock, and the benches sat there empty again just as when all the pigeons flew away from the telephone wires above.
    What did it all mean? Why did people think children were innocent? The ones that were too young to hold conversations ignored each other—so they either played, cried, or slept. If the older ones were boys they hit and pushed each other, and if they were girls, they selected a scapegoat and giggled and made fun of her. And would they be different when they grew up? Nothing went anywhere.
    Marnie’s eyes moved to the swings. She watched the legs and hair flying as the children were pushed by their nannies—some mothers never got to see the park at all. The bright colors and clever sayings on the children’s clothes belied the seriousness of their play—children in the playground never laughed. Again, it was a world of nowhere.
    Today was the day to do it. A plastic bag or seconal—one of these—or both. She actually looked forward to it now—to have made the decision. At last, it would be an end in a world where there was no sunlight—only the tunnel.
    Her eyes had been busy with self-talk, looking at the inside of her head, but just then a movement on the swings arrested her. And she saw something she had never seen before. A woman in a wheelchair was pushing a child. What right did she have to be pushing a child in a swing? She should be in a bed somewhere waiting for her life to end. And the child was laughing at something the woman was saying. She wasn’t a young pretty woman. She was a fat woman with straggly hair and painfully thin legs, and she was laughing at something the child was saying. She heard the child laugh back and address her as momma, so she wasn’t even a nanny. Although the woman was obviously having a wonderful time, Marnie could see that pushing that swing was not too easy for her. She had to raise her body in her seat so her arms would be high enough to push the swing and she had to constantly move her wheelchair back, so she wouldn’t be hit by the swing on its return journey.
    Impulsively Marnie got up. She couldn’t take it any more. The woman was going to break her back if she kept this up. Marnie went over to her and asked, “Can I help swing your little girl for you? It looks rather tiring.” The woman smiled at her, “Oh, heavens no, we’re having too much fun. But thanks anyway” and she ducked just as the swing returned.
    Something was wrong here. That woman should be miserable, envious of healthy people, berating her fate, and here she was, having the time of her life. She would probably give her eyeteeth just to walk out of this playground on the healthy legs that Marnie was about to send packing. Marnie was upset. She asked the woman again. “Are you sure I can’t help you?”
    The woman stopped the swing and looked at her. “I don’t really need any help. Perhaps there is something I can help you with?”
    Marnie was taken aback. “I wish you could.”
    The woman looked up at her quietly and said, “I love life. Perhaps you should appreciate how much you have just by being alive. My daughter and I are just about to take a walk and look at the spring flowers that are just coming up. Have you seen them? They are beautiful.”
    Marnie looked around the playground. True, there were flowers all around, tulips, forsythia, crocuses—strange, she had not even noticed them. And the children in the playground—not all of them were fighting or making fun of others. Some of the boys were laughing as they ran. Some of the girls had their arms around each other, talking excitedly about something they were all deeply involved in. But Marnie had to express what she felt:
    “I have to say it, forgive me, but you are in a wheelchair, look how much you are missing of life.”
    “My dear, I have missed nothing in life I ever wanted; Each day that comes again is a blessing. What more could I ask for? Besides, there is nothing in life that anyone else has that I can’t have or haven’t had.” Maudlin nonsense, thought Marnie, she is just kidding herself.
    The woman paused for a moment, saw something in Marnie’s face, then added, “If you don’t mind, may I ask what you feel that you have in your life that I don’t?”
    Marnie closed her eyes in pain. All she had was the tunnel.
    The lady in the wheelchair looked up at Marnie, waited for a second, then she said, “My name is Edna, my daughter is Bonnie. Come on, let’s all go look at the flowers.” At that moment, a long-buried ghost of a longing for her mother came back to Marnie. Mommy, mommy, she cried inside herself, and she followed docilely, like a lamb. She watched Bonnie, who had run ahead, pointing excitedly at a very purple crocus, and suddenly the tunnel had come to seem much farther away.



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