STROLLER by Nancy Geyer
She’s standing on the bridge that spans Six Mile Creek, where the flats on the city’s south side begin. I see her from a block’s distance, milling about the steel guard rail, her hands free of the baby stroller a few feet away. The stroller looks skeletal from behind–thinly padded and with few embellishments or conveniences. Its thin canopy is stretched forward against an absent sun.
You probably can’t buy those new anymore, I think to myself, to the extent I’m thinking about it at all.
It’s well into November, and after having coffee in town I’m walking home along Cayuga Street–past Sam’s Wine & Spirits, past the public library and the APlus, where you can refuel with candy or gas, past the Holiday Inn and its faint piped-out music. The Inn faces the new municipal parking garage where once, from the sidewalk, I mistook a security camera pointed down the glass-enclosed stairwell for a telescope aimed at the hills. This is where my mind begins to loosen, where purpose yields to possibility now that the errands are done and my civic persona has receded just a bit, knowing, without being conscious of it, that I’m no longer likely to run into anyone I know, if I run into anyone at all.
“It certainly is cold this morning!” the woman says, turning towards me when I reach her. She’s wearing a bright quilted ski jacket that makes her seem bold.
“It certainly is,” I respond, passing briskly by because of it. I dip my head toward the carriage, though, the corners of my mouth beginning to pull up.
Nothing, not even a doll.
“Where’s the baby?” I nearly blurt before I catch myself. The question is almost pure reflex, but I’m afraid it will come out sounding meddlesome–or, worse, accusatory. And so I keep going without breaking my stride.
Still, I can’t help but look back. I look back when I get to the end of the bridge and twice again before I round the corner at Spencer. The woman is watching me, and in my final view of her she is smiling.
Should I have stopped? I wonder. Nothing about this feels quite right. On what pretext, though? She is restless, yes, and there is that empty carriage. But so what? Maybe I’m just overstimulated by the shock of foiled expectation. And there is plenty to goad imagination along this route, where, this time of year, the creek is the color of old metal with bites of cloud.
Why not go back, just to be sure? I feel myself slow, but I’m still moving away. I can’t think of any way to return gracefully, tactfully. If she has done the unthinkable, the baby would certainly have died on impact, meaning there was nothing I could do now beyond escort her to the nearby police headquarters. She looks willing to go, is perhaps waiting for someone to take charge.
I decide she’s just a little “off”–like the man who pushes a shopping cart by my house every day, causing such a ruckus over the fractured pavement that several times I’ve thought something was collapsing all around me.
There are no stores in the direction the man is headed and there is never anything in his cart. If he sees grocery bags in there, perhaps she imagines a baby in the stroller? She lost a child through miscarriage or a birth gone terribly wrong; haven’t I heard of cases like this? Good thing, then, that I didn’t let on that I couldn’t see it.
But wouldn’t she be attending it more closely?
I continue along Spencer, past a line of old wooden houses with multiple electric meters and mailboxes–student lodging in various states of disrepair. The other side of the road is sheer rock face glistening with groundwater. Here and there tiny waterfalls have formed, trickling down into the drainage ditch. There are industrial chemicals in that water, dumped decades ago into a fire reservoir by a hilltop factory that used them to degrease chains.
Everywhere I look I see abandoned responsibility. Just ahead, a cop has pulled over a car speeding on the down slope and is entering its license plate into a laptop computer. Beyond the cop is the traffic circle where I will turn onto my one-block street. Awakened at 2:00 a.m. one morning, I counted five revolutions of a motorcycle before it spun off as if gleefully disengaging from an embrace.
I walk by the flashing lights still thinking about the woman, her smile. The smile is incredulous: Just what the fuck do you think you’re thinking, it asks. It doesn’t feel the need to ease my mind. And that man with the shopping cart, it might add as a further rebuke: How do you know he doesn’t simply prefer the long way around?
Or the smile is embarrassed. It feels guilty even though it knows it’s innocent. It says: I know it looks funny, but I can explain.
And so I listen. She was heading into town with her boyfriend. As soon as the front door closed behind them, the baby started crying. When they reached the bridge, they stopped. She needed to be changed was all; they should have checked one last time before they left. I picture the boyfriend hoisting the baby up and out of the stroller and whisking her home. He doesn’t like to push a stroller, she tells me. And he never likes to be the one left waiting.
While she waits, I pass by. We intersect so briefly. I myself often stop at that bridge, might have lingered if she were not there. I’m always curious about what’s been tossed into the mix since I last looked. For months there was a mattress tucked beneath the bridge’s arch but now it’s downstream and so leaden with water it will take a crane to hoist it out. An upholstered arm chair is anchored in the creek bed, upended like an animal in rigor mortis.
Up and down the creek, there are island clumps of weeds yet to be beaten down by harsher weather. One of them is where the heron stands, pretending to be a reed while coolly scanning for fish. Its perch is vacant now, abandoned for the winter. For a long time I continued to look for it out of habit, but I’m finally accustomed to its absence, so much so that when spring comes it will one day surprise me.
This is Nancy Geyer’s first publication in a national literary journal.