Wednesday

She was sitting in the dark looking at a picture of some type of tree on what she thought might be called a moor. On the moor, if indeed that's what it was, a fine sort of mist was rising around the tree, creating a nice image against the black trunk. It wasn't all that dark, or she couldn't have seen all of these details. Let's make the room just sort of half-lit, like a sub or something. Are subs half-lit?

Sitting in the living room, even on a comfortable chair, the cushy sort that were very popular in the nineties, staring at a picture of the heath, for now she had decided that it was indeed, a heath, though she couldn't distinguish between a heath and a moor definitionally; she felt sure of this assertion. Her son was coming home for the weekend from Albany where he lived with his girlfriend and her two children. She felt ambivalent about her son, was the problem. She had never expected to amount to anything herself, but for her little ball of tenderness and joy to be spending afternoons watching some half-wit's brats; she knew she was feeling things too strongly. She thought people were supposed to mellow as they aged, but she found herself just growing more angry.

The picture was really mostly black, and her dead husband had put it in a nice white frame with ample borders to provide contrast. Her dead husband had been a truck driver for seventeen years, but that was not the point. She stopped looking at the picture of the heath and what she'd decided was a plane tree and made herself a cup of tea. The tea was Early Grey, and it burned her tongue mercilessly. She ascribed a good deal of malice to the tea unexpectedly.

In his youth, her little boy had been whip smart. Head of the class through junior high and at least on the honor roll all the way through high school and a scholarship to a college up north. At some point during this time her husband died, which was immaterial.

This morning I had the image of a woman reading on her front porch rocking chair about a war that had been over for two weeks. And I have to wonder as I am writing this story whether this is that same woman, waiting for her son to come home, so she can feel sad.

Tea is not malicious, she reminded herself as she probed the top of her mouth with her newly burned tongue. The image that kept flitting through her mind that evening was of, it wasn't really quite like that. People don't spend all day thinking about parents of blue hills or sunsets over mountains or hems of skirts like every writer wants us to believe. No, most days the best people can manage is wishing they were anywhere but where they are, something like a man sitting at a desk wishing he was sitting on a bench and that it was warm outside. So what I'm talking about here isn't exactly the precise image that flitted through the woman's head, but rather the image that subconscously essentializes the feeling.

She remembered sitting on the linoleum. Her small son sitting between her legs in a spool of light, his cheeks still red from the warm wash cloth she's used to rub off the dirt, and a pile of cherry tomatoes drying on paper towels. And she remembers his small voice counting the tomatoes on the paper towels, "one, two, three, four," and then stopping and turning to face her, his face now lit by the sun waiting for her to tell him what to say next.

She dumps the tea into the sink with a flourish. She knows now that she will not age gracefully. She will grow old on her own, turning on the television and not leaving the couch until afternoon, thoughts swimming through her head on their way to wider seas. No one will turn to her quite like that, asking for the world to be defined.