SHORT STORY

“Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”—Truman Capote.

HAS IT STARTED YET?

Standing on Lexington Avenue at 60th street she sighs beneath the weather, a long sigh, wetter and heavier than the drear enveloping her. It is surrender—her sighing—masked as relief. It girdles her, pinching her breath, provoking her. The repository of affluence called Bloomingdale’s sits to her right. The Subway Inn tempts her on her left; battered neon-lit haven of the beery rank and file.

Her lawyer’s office is a few blocks south on Lexington, above a storefront psychic reader and advisor, where a marriage that should never have been is now being dismantled. She has just been to see the divorce attorney, a nice young Jewish man who spent a greater part of the session talking about his dreams of being an artist. He lamented a domineering mother who thwarted his artistic aspirations. Said an artist wasn’t a professional. Well, it wasn’t. They weren’t. She should know. She was divorcing herself from the professional dreamers. Her mother-in-law is a haughty pretender and her own son does not escape her dreams for his future as a professional. His mother buys his clothes and he looks like some old man, an absent-minded professor in baggy suits from Brooks Brothers. As a young man he had once played at anarchy.

She is 30. Her marriage, a flimsy scaffold unable to bear the weight of her upbringing, has collapsed.

She was a project girl who aspired to be a painter so she knew about dreaming. Peter Kuperstein, her attorney, wears the kind of suit that indicats he’ll choose success over dreams in the long run. His hair is dark and pulled into a ponytail, though she thinks that will change sooner than later. But his broad silk tie is patterned with the frenzied swirling nightscape of her favorite painter. As a girl she worshipped Van Gogh. She’d copied his famed Starry Night from a reproduction in a book onto a huge piece of Masonite her father had obligingly lugged home. When she finally got to the Museum of Modern Art, on a high school class trip, she’d seen how much smaller the original was. She’d cried. Not from disappointment but from the force of it, all that power in such modest space.

But what will she do now? What to do at this very moment? Traffic snarls in the congested street, barging around delivery vans idling at the loading dock of the department store. She considers shopping to get in out of the rain, staving off a return to an empty apartment. But this store is too fine for her now. It always was really. As an art student at a high school on Second Avenue she’d traversed the department store simply to get to her subway line back to Astoria. Never mind. Alexander’s is just down the block, a store more suited to her newly re-discovered penury.

The truth is she has a closet full of clothes, from stores like Bergdorf’s and Saks, hanging with unpleasant recall. For six years she was deemed, like her husband, incapable of buying her own clothes; the little unmatched girl who needed a moneyed mother-in-law’s guidance to fit in with the Park Avenue dames. The underwear war that brokered no peaceful resolutions, underwear that no one would see except her son and, perhaps the driver who might accidentally run her down.

She can have a few beers at the Subway Inn. How many afternoons had she dug her father out of the darkened cave of lost men? To pass under the shallow blonde smile of Marilyn Monroe in the framed black and white photograph above the door. The same approachable beauty she had seen laughing easily with the counter girls in the cosmetics department of Bloomingdales as she cut through the main floor after school.

It is far too early for a beer, even for her. She tucks a wet, mouse brown tendril back behind her ear. Farah Fawcett’s whipped silver main was replicated on the heads of young women everywhere, a style her straight brown hair would never be wrestled into. And she cannot go into a bar dressed as she is. The yellow linen dress was too, well, yellow. Her mother-in-law always insisted on color when she was happiest in somber hues. She thought the brightly colored dress would buck her up, help her to appear more sure of herself when she met her attorney for the first time. But it is all wrong, and she’d had to spend some time, too much of his time, explaining herself, trying to make him understand she was not the kind of woman who wore yellow linen. “My mother-in-law bought it for me,” she mumbled at what she guessed was dismissive appraisal.

A wardrobe coup is in order but she doesn’t actually have a lot of her own money yet to underwrite a drastic transformation. Her attorney will take much of it. Before he left, her husband had lived with her in a sunny upper eastside apartment a few blocks from the medical institution where he got his doctorate. It was a comfortable life, too comfortable among graduate students with lesser means. Her father-in-law had devised a way to support them and he gave her more money than her contrived clerical job for his psychiatric practice was worth. But it was meant to pay the rent and leave his son free of mundane financial concerns while he was in graduate school. It was a way around taxes. She sometimes kept some of it back for herself, especially as the marriage deteriorated. Especially after her father-in-law prescribed a strong antidepressant to keep her quiet about her unhappy marriage to his son, especially then. She never filled the prescriptions and pretended she had and just stopped complaining. Her father-in-law, believing himself omnipotent, celebrated his victory over her, giving her more money.

Heading toward Third Avenue she passes the original building, the bit of movie set left behind as a reminder of where the two Bloomingdale brothers began their enduring venture. She’d met her husband in a helter skelter era of riots on college campuses, violent anti war protests. Their shaky venture carried them through Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy, assassinated within months of each other. She was an eager apprentice to her husband’s political activism. Then came the walk on the moon. While they watched Neil Armstrong take his small step, she and her husband were getting stoned with his Uncle Maury in an over-decorated apartment on the Upper East Side. Woodstock followed. In the spacious Central Park West apartment of a classmate of his whose father was a well-known labor lawyer, they had sat around smoking pot, listening to traffic reports on the radio and planning their trip to Yasgur’s Farm. They were still sitting around when Arlo Guthrie announced from the stage, “The New York State Freeway is closed man. Far out!”

They had gotten stoned, and they had missed it.

She scans the busy avenue ahead. Where is the best place to hide? In a darkened movie theater, of course, where a yellow linen dress has no effect. Whatever is playing, at the Baronet or the Coronet Theater next door will do. Deliberate strides take her across the broad avenue.

Both theaters are fixed with the same black letters on the marquees: Eraserhead. It is a film by a controversial new filmmaker, one who is getting mixed reviews and she hesitates because she has read something about this movie, something off putting. She reconsiders. If she was feeling groovier there is the Queensboro Bridge. She’d walked across that bridge as a student and when she got to Manhattan she felt like she could do anything. Although the rain had stopped, the summer afternoon air was dingy and cloying. Seeing the film is just about half an hour away she buys a ticket and enters an empty theater.

Relishing the cool, semi-darkened interior, she slips down into a velvet-upholstered seat near the back. A questioning voice distracts her from rummaging in her bag for her book. “Has it started yet?” Standing at her side in the aisle, hardly bigger than the large container of popcorn he cradles against his chest, the tiny man asks again: “Has the film started yet?” His voice, a breathy lisp, is like that of a child. But he is an older man. Older than she is. A black cap is pulled rakishly over his eyes. He is wearing one of those British military sweaters, pea soup green, with patched elbows.

Gazing up at him she smiles, resisting a startled recognition of the infamous writer, and then turns toward the front of the theater, indicating to the empty screen. He turns away, as if in a trance, and prances lightly down the aisle to take a front row seat. The theater lights go down. The film begins. They are the only two in the audience.

When the house lights go on she is alone in the theater. “Who can blame him?” she thinks, feeling slightly unsettled herself. But she stuck it out, intrigued by the surreal black and white horror story unfolding on the screen.

Outside in the street, the afternoon has lightened somewhat and there are hollows of blue in the clouds. She wants to forget about the film for the moment and instead think about the writer with the popcorn. She’d devoured everything the diminutive author had written—from a Manhattan fairy tale with its dark corners to the profoundly darker stretches of Kansas. As she heads uptown she ticks off characters in her head.

She wishes she had been named Holly. It has a nice ring to it. A name is everything. Her parents, no literary lions, went for the obvious. The most popular girl’s name in 1947 was a hit song. Her sister, born a year later, would suffer the same fate. The struggle for attention starts with the unimaginative naming of the child. Truth is she’s not the waif that Audrey Hepburn was. She wasn’t an eager young woman in New York for the first time to live out her dreams. She was a native. A project girl. She was born too early to be a Holly, but why not a Celeste, or a Bette? No, her parents handily plucked her name from the radio airwaves. “When I go to sleep, I never count sheep, I count all my dreams about….”

Well, she will soon shed the alien surname she has been lumbered with for the duration of her short marriage. Their rented apartment will be in her name. Her attorney will see her through; get her a monthly stipend for a year. Of course he was right. Burgeoning feminist principles aside, she needs to live. Find her footing again.

At 74th Street she pauses under the ivy green awning at J.G. Melon. She catches a glimpse of a young woman in an outlandish yellow dress reflected in the darkened window. She has a job interview in a week, an entry-level graphic position at a community newspaper. The yellow dress will be long gone by then. She steps closer to the window and whispers to the ghost: “Has my life started yet?”

HAS IT STARTED YET? is an original short story by Linda Danz

STORIES ON THE AMERICAN FRIEND Writers Guild of America, East #R28299

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. The use of names of actual persons, places, and events is incidental to the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. ©July 2009.