HELP THESE DAYS by Linsey Trask
At dinner the man throws a fork at the waitress.
He holds it up, turns it in his fingers as if inspecting the tines for spots. The man doesn’t look at the waitress or at Mary seated across from him. Already their reservation was lost. They were seated in the back of the crowded restaurant, at a small square table that rocks from side to side when they rest their elbows on it. A candle flickers in between them. Mary reaches forward and takes the green St. Patrick’s Day carnation out of a bud vase and peels the petals in her hand.
The waitress is big-boned and dark. She wears a green felt hat and the smile she uses to get through a busy night, a tight, tense crease of her lips. Fork in hand, the man quizzes her on the menu. His voice is calm and quiet. Unsettling. The waitress falters into half-answers. She tells the man she does not know the wine he asks about, says she’ll check, she’ll look, she’ll be right back.
He throws the fork. The waitress looks at her leg where it hit, then at Mary, who averts her eyes. The waitress picks the fork up off the floor, says she will bring the man another as if he’d dropped it accidentally.
Mary hasn’t said a word since he’d taken her to his house straight from the airport, where, against a wall in his living room, he quickly fucked her then asked if she was hungry.
She flew in from Texas with a handful of dollars in her wallet, leaving behind a lover who lost his love and 2,394 dollars worth of bounced checks, for which she was supposed to go to court two days before.
Mary met the man in the lounge of the high-end Houston hotel she paid for with money her lover gave her to leave, an extravagance to soothe her heartbreak. The man sat next to her at the bar, paid for her drinks, listened to her dilemma. He bought her dinner three nights in a row, taking only a kiss on the forehead in return, like a generous and reserved uncle. He told Mary they were both too alone, too sad. “Let me take care of you,” he said. “Come stay with me.”
Mary agreed to give it a try, to come visit for a week. She got on the plane and off in Albuquerque. The plane’s next stop was Arizona, and now she wonders: Should I have stowed away and made the connection to Phoenix?
They eat rare steak in silence with thick-handled knives. The waitress pushes two tables together across from them and seats a rowdy party of ten that drinks green beer from large glass pitchers. The man stares at them, furious. Mary looks at the knife in his hand and imagines him hurling it at the party, over-handed, like a warrior or a circus performer. One of the party, a man with curly red hair, laughs with his head thrown back, his round Adam’s apple exposed, a perfect bull’s eye.
The man brings her home, whispers I love you in the dark, which scares her more than when he enters her and asks if it hurts.
Mary’s mind retreats to Phoenix.
She remembers hearing something about how people move to Arizona to breathe. Would she have been better off there? With no money, she’d have to take a job she’d hate. Wait tables at a greasy spoon. She pictures a long highway road at midnight, a bright spot of light on the horizon, a diner. A place where for a couple dollars she can sit for a night and drink coffee, get to know the waitresses well enough to ask if the place is hiring.
Inside this diner, she’d find truck drivers in starched baseball caps sitting on chrome barstools around a long lunch counter, beside old women with tall hair, whose rear ends the men pinch with their greasy fingers. On the à la carte menu there’s fried okra and pickled beets.
Mary imagines walking in, sitting down to order. She traces the pattern of colliding purple boomerangs on the floor with her big toe.
Her waitress has honeywood skin and wears dreadlocks knotted on top of her head like a nest. She pours a cup of coffee, pats Mary on the wrist.
“Traveling far tonight?” the waitress asks.
She says she doesn’t know where she’ll end up.
“That’s a bottomless cup,” the waitress says. “You might as well sit tight and wait this one out.”
Mary opens her eyes, stares at the ceiling.
The man’s rhythm is precise and even as the tick of a clock. It lulls her, like sleeping in the bow of a flat-bottomed boat after the motor’s cut off, moving with the current in the half-light of morning, as her Daddy sets out traps for blue crabs. The man’s back feels stubbly, as if he’d shaved it. He calls her my love. The words fall flat from his lips, practiced.
Middle of the night, Mary decides to leave, to walk out of the house as he snores. She sneaks out of bed, tiptoes slowly to keep the wood floor from creaking and alerting him. The house is unlit; she feels her way against the rough stucco wall to the front door. Outside on the porch, she pulls the screen-door handle. It is key-locked, but she pulls it again just to make sure, then walks inside, a little faster than before, through to the back door. Opens it. Another key-locked screen. She presses her face against it, inhales metal, dust, and the cold air of a soundless night. In the next room weight lifts off the mattress. The bed frame and floor groan. She scampers into a utility closet, squeezes between a water heater and the wall. Stucco scrapes her back.
As his steps get closer, a scream builds up in her.
“Why were you in there?” he says. “What were you doing?”
They lie naked on the bed.
The long scratches on her back burn. Mary hugs her sides and doesn’t answer.
In the morning they go eat. They pass through streets lined with squat stucco homes the same color as the ground, warm shades of brown and gray. The mountains in the distance seem to rise from the flatness of the town like tidal waves. Mary doesn’t have sunglasses and squints under her hand. They don’t talk. There’s a rattle in the jeep’s engine she focuses on, trying to decide what side it’s coming from.
“See that house over there?” the man asks. He points at a small brown house.
Mary nods.
“I used to know the woman who lived there,” he says. “She had an ex-boyfriend who broke into her house one night and smeared shit on her walls. You want to know what I did to him?” he asks.
Mary shakes her head no.
When he reaches over and puts his hand between her legs, she jumps.
They sit at an outside table. Though the sun is bright and warm, there is a slight chill in the breeze, and goosebumps rise on Mary’s arms and neck. She studies a black gum stain on the sidewalk like a Rorschach inkblot, first a bird, then a rooster, then a small beach hut with a palm-thatched roof. The man buys a newspaper and reads the headlines out loud, looks at her, checks her reaction.
“This place serves breakfast all day,” he tells her.
She drinks two cups of black coffee then orders a mimosa.
They are surrounded by students bent over textbooks and smoking. One boy wears a faded green shamrock painted on his cheek. The couple beside them argues about the best way to housebreak their new Labrador, “Hank.” Bluegrass music plays on a cassette recorder beside the door.
Mary feels out of place, like they’ve intruded, the man’s bald head and polo shirt, the perfect lines of her silk-lined beige dress. Mary wonders, Why did he bring me here? She thinks maybe the man wanted to show her he could be hip. Young girls, their thin bodies shrouded in wooly sweaters and translucent batik dresses, sit together in circles on the pavement and braid strands of hemp into necklaces. He comes here alone to watch these girls, she thinks, to gaze at their tanned faces and bare feet.
Maybe in college she looked like them, years ago when she lived near the ocean and burned her skin in the sun, but now she is pale and voluptuous. There is a quality about the girls, with their duffle bags full of loose-fitting clothes and cheap wooden beads, their knotted hair and vacant stoned smiles, that reminds Mary of the way she feels, needy and homeless, how she knows the man must see her. Transient.
He comes here to prey on them, she thinks.
Mary gets up, says she has to go to the bathroom. She walks through the restaurant, to the hallway, where there is a pay phone. She picks it up and listens until a recording comes on asking her to dial a number or hang up. Mary has no one to call. She sets down the receiver and leans against the wall. The college boy who waits on their table passes by her, a dishtowel slung on his shoulder. He meets her eyes, smiles, and asks if she needs change.
“Your food’s getting cold,” he says. The boy wears his hair in a long stringy ponytail, is dark and lean. Mary thinks about meeting him in the bathroom, the jut of his hips in her belly.
The man is waiting for her outside.
Mary looks away.
“Do you need help with anything?” the waiter says.
She thinks about asking him for the back way out of the restaurant.
The kitchen door swings open. A girl with a tray of salt and pepper shakers hefted onto her shoulder tells the college boy to come help her with the side work. He smiles at Mary, walks away.
Mary returns to the table and sits down in front of eggs and toast.
The man watches her above the top of his paper.
She drinks the mimosa in one large gulp and orders another. She closes her eyes and lets her mind wander back to the diner in Arizona.
A brunette waitress comes by and asks about dessert. Lemon pie is the special.
The brunette smacks gum, wears a white pillbox hat. She smells like sea oats after they’ve baked in the sun all day. “One time won’t hurt your figure,” she says, a Loretta Lynn twang in her voice. “Though a good figure’s like money in the bank.”
Mary sits up, runs a hand down the front of her dress.
“Don’t worry,” the waitress says. “You look fine.” She licks her index finger then smoothes it over Mary’s eyebrows.
“I’ll do anything to be safe,” Mary says, though as she says it, Mary doesn’t feel like she’s telling the truth.
The waitress looks behind her back as if she’s nervous about someone seeing her. She bends over and whispers, “Honey, it just ain’t out there for you. You’re the kind it don’t exist for. Just keep running, or hell, I’d just give up.”
Mary hears the man tell the waiter not to bring her another drink and to hurry up with the check. He kicks her foot under the table and says, “Open your eyes. We’re in a restaurant.”
The man drives to a Home Depot store. He needs a shower head because his broke that morning. She wonders how it was ruined, if he squeezed it in his hand like a neck.
The store is the size of a small coliseum, merchandise stocked up to the ceiling. Mary loses him down one of the long fluorescent aisles, and hides in the section of the store that displays lamps.
A black man looks at light bulbs. She takes in the solid square of his shoulders, the throaty orchid purple of his skin. She gets close to him, pretends to look at light switches. His clean Ivory Soap smell burns her nose. She touches his hip with her own. He says, “Excuse me,” and smiles.
She brushes against him again, lingers. “I’m in trouble,” she says to him. “I need a ride.”
The black man laughs like she’s dished him a one-liner, grabs a box of bulbs, and leaves shaking his head.
The man finds her standing in front of a lamp shaped like the Eiffel Tower, turning it on and off. He buys it for her.
They get back to his house and the man pulls the dress over her head, picks her up, and sits her on top of the kitchen stove. He gets on his knees and puts his mouth between her legs. A metal burner digs into her ass. His hands manipulate her like a car engine.
Mary withdraws to the diner in Arizona.
A waitress comes by and asks if she wants more coffee. She is short and squat, with bleached streaks in the ends of her hair, and silver bangle bracelets on her arms.
She tells Mary, “You gonna stay here all night, you better tip me good.”
Mary tells the waitress she’s scared the anger shifting in him is lava.
The waitress says she’s no counselor. She tells Mary they have hotlines she can call, and pours coffee into her cup. Mary watches silver bracelets gather and jangle around the waitress’s wrist. There is a small black tattoo of an eagle above her thumb.
Mary points at the tattoo. “Did it hurt?” she says. “What does it mean?”
The waitress rubs the eagle with her finger until it blurs then disappears. She says, “I wanted a yellow rose, but the bird was cheaper. See how we’re the same? I also settled for what I didn’t want.”
Behind her, Mary hears a fluttering of wings, a sound like a kite catching wind. She turns around and finds a long brown feather floating to the ground.
The waitress stares at her hand until the eagle’s outline rises back to the surface of her skin. “Just remember that I’m a woman in your mind,” the waitress says.
Mary feels it build up. She tells the waitress she doesn’t want to cum.
“Go ahead,” the waitress says. “Might as well get something good out of this.”
Mary opens her eyes and finds the man watching her, waiting.
He walks away from her wiping his face with the back of his hand, picks her dress up off the floor, and walks out of the room. He comes back with a long flannel shirt, tells her to put it on, then shows her where he keeps the keys to the screen doors. Tells her to go smoke when she needs to.
When he leaves the kitchen, Mary pours bourbon from a pint she brought with her on the plane, takes a can of soda outside, sits on the ground, smokes.
She can hear the man inside the house banging tools around in his bathroom and fixing his shower. Mary wonders about the old hate she senses he holds in, anger that has nothing and everything to do with her. What would set him off? She takes a drag off her cigarette and tucks her cold naked knees into the flannel shirt. It is too soon for her to tell.
Mary wonders who will help her when he does.
She knows how to fend for herself, but is exhausted with the lonely results, the cheap empty rooms in which she abides and endures until someone – her hero, her leading man – comes to save her.
Mary remembers the time she nearly drowned waiting.
Net in hand, she stands still and quiet on an island of marsh grass losing ground with the waxing tide. She is twelve years old. The water started at her feet, rose past her ankles, and now laps above her knees. A red cooler drifts beside her. Brown puff mud bubbles and sucks between her toes and around the painter’s stick lodged between her feet. Attached to the stick is a long piece of off-white yarn leading out and tied to a handful of silver fish skins. She waits to scoop the hurried shadow of a submerged blue crab lured by her bait, harder to detect as the inlet washes in and the waves increase. When she hears the hum of an outboard motor, she scans the water for the flat-bottomed boat, afraid that it will lose her amid the shrinking landscape and deepening gullies. Because the boats that pass her are not familiar, she doesn’t signal, keeps her arms at her sides.
She remembers closing her mouth tight to practice holding her breath.
The man comes outside where she sits and drinks bourbon. He asks about dinner, says for her to decide.
Mary rolls up the sleeves of the flannel shirt.
“Sushi? Italian?”
She tells him it doesn’t matter.
Then man bends over and takes her chin in his hand. He smiles. “Sushi,” he says.
When he walks back inside, he steps on the empty soda can rolling beside her on the ground, and walks away with it stuck to his shoe, aluminum crushing against the concrete.
When it gets dark, she comes inside and finds he’s gotten into the bourbon. Her pint is empty in the sink. The man now hums in the bathroom, a song she remembers hearing but doesn’t know the words to.
In the bedroom, a new dress, strapless and black, hangs on the back of the door. Her luggage is missing. Mary thinks to call the police, to report the man a thief, a kidnapper, abuser, then remembers her decision to get off the plane.
The man knocks on the bedroom door and tells her there are shoes for her in his closet, another dress if she doesn’t like the one he’s laid out. Tomorrow they can shop for more. She strokes the dress’s slinky fabric, glances at the price tag. She imagines his black eye watching her through the keyhole.
In the jeep on their way to dinner the man talks about nothing – the lack of rain, his neighbor’s Tropicana rosebushes. Mary focuses again on the rattle in the jeep’s engine. What side is it on? She tries to imagine the parts of the motor, to locate the source of the noise in her mind, travels around fan belts and wiper fluid containers, but doesn’t know enough about the mechanics to keep it going.
Mary thinks: this will be my life with this man. We will eat out every night to treat me. I’ll live in my mind, outside of him.
At the sushi bar he requests a room enclosed in rice paper. Inside he reclines on pillows, shoeless, orders warm sake, and continues to talk about nothing – new computers in his office, the stoplights in downtown Albuquerque.
Mary deliberately orders everything on the menu, and stops only when the table is covered with small square jewels of raw fish. To provoke him, she will only eat a few pieces; Mary wants to see how long it takes the man to get angry. She peels a piece of blue-fin off a mound of sticky rice with her fingers, slides it into her mouth like a tongue.
“This is what it’s all about,” the man says. He grabs her bare foot under the table, a quick and impulsive move he seems uncomfortable with. “You are happy?” he asks.
Mary knows it’s not a question; it’s a decision he’s made.
Her mind slips back to the diner in Arizona.
Some teens come in, three boys wearing letterman’s jackets and blue jeans, two girls in poodle skirts and saddle oxfords. They sit a few seats down from Mary and talk loudly of drag races and drive-in movies. One of the boys pulls a flask out of his jacket and pours it into his root beer float. She watches his hand reach under the counter and fumble with his girlfriend’s flouncy crinoline. The girlfriend lifts her skirts to the knee.
The waitress with the honeywood skin fills up her coffee cup. Pink-tinged eggs the size of Jordan almonds lie in the nest of dreadlocks on her head, and two hummingbirds float around it, their chests an emerald green so deep that it makes Mary dizzy.
“How are you doing here?” the waitress asks.
Mary tells her she hates the person she is in Albuquerque.
“But you’re in Phoenix,” the waitress says. “You’re with me.” She takes up the empty plate in front of Mary.
The cowbell hanging above the front door jangles.
“You know him, don’t you?” the waitress asks.
Mary looks over her shoulder, and sees the dark and lean waiter from breakfast, the man she wanted to make love to in the bathroom. He sits down at a table across from her. The brunette waitress with the white pillbox hat flirts with him, sits on the table with her skirt hiked up her thigh and pours orange juice into a cereal bowl.
The man again reaches for her foot under the table. “Quit daydreaming and finish your dinner,” he says.
That night, after the man falls asleep drunk and on his back, Mary gets up, gathers the dress and matching black shoes off the floor, goes into the kitchen, to the drawer where she saw him put the keys, hidden under dish towels that smell like fabric softener.
She goes outside and gets in his jeep, pulls slowly out the driveway, heads for the place where they had breakfast in hopes of finding the lean and dark waiter. He seemed kind, easy. Maybe she will go home with him and cook breakfast in the morning. He’ll like having her around, maybe help her get a job. She can save money, figure out where to go next.
The restaurant is full of people. There are no tables outside and Mary thinks maybe she’s at the wrong place, but then, through the window, she sees her waiter moving around the crowd with a tray. She leaves the keys in the ignition.
A congregation of men wait in the front to be seated. A thin sheen of sweat coats every face. She squeezes past. One pinches her ass. Mary turns around, finds what looks like a grown-up version of a boy she knew as a girl in kindergarten, whom she kissed every day at recess behind a silver a/c unit. The man winks at her, talks to a man beside him. Both laugh.
Waiters dart from table to table, maneuver unnoticed and unobserved around groups of men nursing drinks. Every waiter looks like her boy from certain angles – a long back, the curve of a triceps holding up a tray of food, a loose ponytail – but the place is dimly lit and she can’t see details.
Mary panics.
She steps up on the leg of a man eating spaghetti, and hoists herself onto his table, leaving a powdery footprint on his trousers. Her ascent knocks over a full glass of iced tea, two cherry tomatoes roll off the man’s salad onto the floor. She plants her foot in the middle of another man’s piece of fried catfish, her heel mashing a dollop of rice pilaf. The room shuts off. Every face turns towards her. She scans the crowd for the dark and lean waiter; she’d call out his name if she knew it. Some of the faces look surprised, some amused, some annoyed, but all are familiar to her. It could be that she knows every man in the restaurant, a high-school boyfriend she used to steal her daddy’s rusted pick-up to go meet, the over-fond father of a toddler she used to baby-sit. In the crowd is the black man from the Home Depot. He points at her and waves. In the back of the room, where it is darkest, is the lover she lived with in Texas.
Seated at the bar is the dark and lean waiter.
In front of him is a plate of Belgian waffles piled high with curls of whipped cream and sprinkled with strawberries. The waiter licks the top; when he turns and looks at her, a white tuft hangs off the end of his nose. He does not smile, but takes the fork beside his plate and raises it above his head like a relic. There is a clamor of silverware around the room as the men, like knights unsheathing swords, unroll their silverware and take up their forks.
Mary’s eyes burn and panic squeezes her chest. Her pulse throbs in her ears as if they are filled with water. She closes her eyes and remembers drowning. Waves lap her waist. Seagulls hover and scream in the air currents above her head. Blue crabs nibble her toes. The red cooler floats further and further away.
Linsey Trask lives in Austin, Texas. “Help These Days” is her first published story in a national literary magazine.