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Holding On

Joseph Bodie

    She drives, clenching the steering wheel with white-knuckled hands, keeping the car on a steady and resolute course, aimed like a bullet in the center of the lane, speeding down the freeway at speeds she has never before reached, the asphalt of the freeway crumbling beneath her tires, the colors, white and yellow and black, coalescing into an abstract painting as the speedometer reaches 110 and the night and the road and the lights blur together into one entity as she steals a glance in the rearview mirror, the police cars still behind her in steady pursuit, relentless and implacable, trailing her like the past, like regret, and she knows that they will never give up, the lights of their sirens washing the night sky in broad brush strokes of blues and reds, a swirling, tempestuous maelstrom of authority and order, the force winds of a future blocked, stillborn, denied, dreamed but never destined to materialize, and she pushes her foot down on the gas, and she leans back in the seat, an inertia forced repose, her arms outstretched and taut, locked in position like steel support beams, and the needle on the speedometer pushes forward with a mechanical obstinacy, as gears redline and pistons scream, 125, 140, the needle pushed to its limit and her pushing as well, forward, obstinate and determined, evading both the past and the future, but especially the present, hoping to collapse the three together into a new sense of time and place, a new life, and she checks again in the rearview mirror and sees that the police cars are falling behind, she is gaining ground, advantage, if only for an instant, but she will take it, dwell in it, in that instant and its promises, and entertain ideas of hope and victory, and she hears a faint sound invade the interior of the car, almost silent, quiet, at first, but growing in intensity, a steady beeping, an importunate and consistent sound, louder now, demanding not to be ignored, and she realizes, as the sound increases in volume, its familiarity, recognizes, in a slow and stifled cognition, that she has heard the sound many times before, everyday now for eight years, every morning, and as the whites and yellows of the freeway and the blues and reds of the police begin to fade away, she realizes she is waking up, stolen from sleep by the steady, invading sound of her alarm clock.

#

    Elizabeth stands in her kitchen. Pots and pans sit on the stove. Pots and pans that cooked breakfast and are now empty and encrusted with the remnants of eggs and bacon. Plates and bowls and glasses sit neglected on the table. The thin remaining film of milk and orange juice and coffee coats their inner surfaces. Elizabeth sees a table that needs to be cleared. She sees a labor an hour in the making and gone and consumed in half of that. She sees herself as the unsung hero of the early morning. The underappreciated. The help, sometimes it feels.
    It is Monday and the kids have just left for school. It is the start of a routine that is a seven day cycle. Elizabeth starts to clear the table. She piles the plates and bowls and glasses and pots and pans into the sink. She stands at the counter. Her hands on the marble surface. Her head downcast. She sighs and walks away.
    Through the sliding glass door and into her backyard. She takes a pack of cigarettes off a wrought iron table. She pulls one from the pack and lights it. The smoke from her cigarette plumes skyward. Elizabeth follows her first exhalation with her eyes. The dawning sun ascending in the sky. The oranges and yellows of the early morning becoming the blue of the afternoon. Her gaze retreats to the table. A collection of beer cans. Thirteen to be precise. Evidence of her husband’s night last night. Evidence of his own private revelry. Left for the help. For her. To clean up. Not asked. Not implied. Expected. She expects the pile will reappear tomorrow morning. Is certain of it. She crumples her still burning cigarette in the ashtray. She sighs again. She walks inside the house. It doesn’t feel like a home. It feels like walls. It feels court ordered. She grabs a few white garbage bags from under the sink. She grabs some cleaning supplies. She grabs some yellow plastic gloves. She sets them on the counter. She sighs. It is the start of a routine that is a seven day cycle. Endless and thankless.

#

    She runs, down dimly lit hallways made of rock and grey stone and wet with the water that trickles down the crevices from a ceiling too high to be visible, her legs and lungs ache, red with pain, the tendons of her calves tight like coiled steel, hot with friction and movement, something is behind her, pursuing, something not seen but felt, shadowy and clawed, behind her in the labyrinthine corridors, unrelenting, she knows that the beast will never stop chasing her, like her shadow and perhaps it is, something from the darkness immemorial, intrinsically and irrevocably attached to her, but she must try, she must run, evade, persevere, she must find the strength, her lungs and legs enervated, her body weak, it all happening so fast, and she swears she wasn’t here a second ago, but has been here before, turned this corner, collided with these walls, felt the water on her shoulder, gazed down the hallway that stretches into the blackness of eternity, the first black, and she tries to pick up speed, to reach the end, and time slows to a crawl, she is running through air, dense and stifling and impeding, and she calls on energy that she knows, fears, is long depleted, and tries to run through the density, her hands feeling the walls beside her, steadying her, and she feels the breath of the beast, cold and hot and mocking, the weight on her chest, and she turns a corner, quickly, stumbling, meeting a dead end, the large grey wall, her hands pressed against the cold and wet stone, the numbers 6:30, as big as a billboard, displayed in an iridescent and glowing red, pulsating in rhythm with her breath, as she inhales and exhales, and she wakes in her bed with the wet of the walls on her chest.

#

    Elizabeth sits in her SUV. Plastic grocery bags fill the space behind her. Eggs and bacon and cereal. Bread and meat and condiments. Orange juice and coffee grounds. Everything it takes to sustain a family. She will stock the commissary when she gets home. The mess hall. There is detergent and all-purpose cleaners. Brand names like Joy. Sparkle. Pictures of happy women and their plastic-gloved hands. Their smiles admiring dishwasher-fresh wine glasses. Smudge free. This is your life. A packaged existence. A marketed reality. This is what you should care about:
    A husband and a family. And a house surrounded by a white picket fence.
    But the American dream is shattered. Rudely awakened to an intoxicated and inattentive husband. To importunate and demanding children. To mounting debt. The bank owns more of the house than you do. The white picket fence is not painted at all. And no Tom Sawyer in sight. Mark Twain and Norman Rockwell’s lies. The fairy tale we were all force fed as children has turned out to be more like castor oil and less like birthday cake. And there are no princesses or knights in shining armor. Only ugly reality. Only housewives and factory workers.
    Elizabeth lights a cigarette and looks in the rearview mirror. She angles it to better frame her face. She scrutinizes. Her forehead. Her cheeks. Her chin. It is an obsession. It is a symptom of a greater disease. She discovers a few bumps on her forehead. Above her left eye. Blackheads. Embryonic pimples. They will go away on their own. But Elizabeth cannot help prodding. She takes a drag on her cigarette and puts it down in the ashtray to free up her hands. She takes a blackhead between her index fingers and squeezes. She squints her eyes and purses her lips. And then she squeezes. Squeezes until the blackhead bursts. She feels the pain and the pop. The release. The pain. She feels. She squeezes until the white string has stopped and is replaced by blood. She squeezes in pumps. Until there is no more. Until her index fingers are stained and coated. She rolls her thumb and index finger together. Until the blood is dispersed. Until it is less the red of blood and more the pink of her fingers. She looks in the mirror again and resumes the search. One on her cheek. She presses and squeezes. Burst. Pain. Feel. Squeeze. Pump. Blood. Is this your life? Is this what you should care about?

#

    She sits, on a chair in the sand, facing the ocean, the waves lapping the shore in a steady cadence, the crash and the fizz, a comforting static hum, the ebb and flow, white sand stretching endless and flat, the sun midday in the sky, shining golden yellow rays of warmth and heat on her bikinied body, her skin browned and shiny from a mixture of lotion and sweat, breath it in, the beach, the sand, the lotion, she leans up from her repose, supported by her elbows, and takes a sip from the martini glass on the table in the sand beside her, the cool and refreshing vodka flowing down her throat, the warm burn of liquor, the numbing, and she looks around the empty beach as a breeze blows slowly across her body and her hair, the scene, the blue of the beach and the yellow of the sun, subdued and diffused through the lenses of her sunglasses, the silence, the calm and the serenity, the crash and the fizz, she is young again, she will always be young, and the future is as vast and mysterious as the ocean before her and its depths, it is a feeling, an epiphany, she wishes to hold on to, but it will not last, cannot last, it is not in the nature of things, it is antithetical to the procession of time, she realizes this and damns the architect of time, the nature, or at least the state, of things as well, and she looks at the ocean and sees that there is no ebb, only flow, the waves not receding, never going back, only forward, moving in on the beach, on her, resolute and unstoppable, they are getting closer now, increasingly, the waves, and the crash drowns out the fizz, becomes louder, a sonorous boom, a steady pulse, the amplified tick of an everlasting metronome, and the translucent diffusion of her sunglasses progress to a black opaqueness, and she cannot see, not the waves or the yellow of the sun or the white of the sand and all of its purity and promise, she can only feel the waves as they reach her feet and progress, move up to her knees and then to her chest, cold and salty, up to her throat, her chin, and a voice whispers softly in her ear as the waves inch to her mouth, ‘Mom, wake up’, and she does. Her quick and heavy breaths slow into one final sigh. And she smiles. She rolls over and picks her daughter up with both arms and throws her onto the bed. And they both smile and laugh. Her daughter resting on her chest, she holds her tight and strokes her hair. Elizabeth looks out of the bedroom window, continually stroking the blonde hair of her daughter, the hair that is definitely her mother’s, and she sees the early morning dawn. The warm yellows and bright oranges blending in the sky, Elizabeth continues to smile and hold on.

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