It was the glassy-eyed season in the city. No one bothered to look up or down, just straight ahead. The subway was packed with people wrapped in winter wear, furry sardines bobbing to work with sound tracks of rails screeching, violins singing for coins, faces hardening. Maycheck stood under the awning at the outdoor station, staring up at the stained glass on the small hut that held the turnstile and the disgruntled attendant. Slush sat in brown piles against the garbage cans and walls, icicles dangled like stalactites, dripping brown liquid onto the platform. Maycheck wrapped her flimsy coat around her tighter, her fingerless gloves showing a flash of raw, red digits before they were stuffed back into her coat pockets to shiver along with the rest of her.
Maycheck remembered her boots today. It was surprisingly often that she looked down and saw a pair of soaked flats — the Q train already angling in towards the platform — and let out a stream of curses. There was no turning back, to get a pair of boots or gloves with fingers, for then she would be late to work. This was before she figured out that the boss was least likely to know, since she had a key to the office, and he was often still asleep in the art gallery past the time she arrived. The only problem with this was that the mini fridge was in the gallery, and her lunch had to wait to be put in there, until the boss woke up.
Maycheck worked in a basement. She lived in one too. They weren’t the same basements. Hers was a little less dreary; there were small windows and beautiful Victorian style houses outside. Though three or four families occupied them, she dreamt of owning one herself one day, and pretended the weather would miraculously change, the winter season diminish itself down to a mere few days of light snow and crisp air, nothing that threatened the extremities. The basement she worked in was damp and dark, with dirt smudged glass blocks in a narrow panel on the ceiling, letting brownish sidewalk light in when feet weren’t trampling by overhead. The Christmas lights wrapped around the pipes on the ceiling were the only festivity.
The best part of the day was lunch. Sometimes there would be a beer or two during the workday, courtesy of her lanky, tattooed coworker, or as an apology from the boss who yelled at her earlier. The workday was a cloud of dysfunction and the occasional beverage, and lunch was a break in the monotony. During the fall, Maycheck would walk to the Brooklyn bridge with her lunch, sit in the windy park and watch the fashionable people with their tiny dogs, the couples with their hands linked into each other’s tight jeans, the male undecipherable from the female from behind, and breathe in and out deeply, hoping time would stop.
Coming back from lunch was almost the worst part of the day, second only to the freezing mornings, fighting the biting wind to push the swollen door in with her whole body and enter the office’s hallway in the morning, and third to the cramped nights of layered blankets, crowded onto a twin bed with all her worries and hauntings, the light of the day swallowed by the slick pavement, the sounds of cats fighting for territory in the night, the roommate and his lady of the moment, pounding out moans and headboard rhythms; Maycheck was a ball in the corner, a lump of slush that got inside, trying to melt off the grime and the ice to discover something flesh, something pink and regular, beating inside.
Gina Goldblatt is currently finishing up her MFA in fiction at Mills College. She is an east coast transplant to the bay area, a poet turned novelist, and is working on her first novel,
entitled "It Was All Honey and Berries."
ISSUE:
F A L L
2011
BONUS FICTION: Faith Is Three Parts Formaldehyde...
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