LEGAL STUFF: This is my own story, which I happen to like very much. Please do not steal or post it anywhere without my permission.

Written during Susquehanna University’s Advanced Writers’ Workshop 2002. I was in the fiction genre, and I wrote this story in less than five days -- a miracle, considering my snail-like usual pace. There are a few poorly sewn edges and things I would have changed or done differently if I had had more time, but I like it and I’m proud of it.

All comments and criticism are welcome.

Wild Girl

It was hot as hell and I needed a cigarette.

I rotated the knob on the side of the car door, the windowpane squeaking noisily in protest as it slid down, letting a gust of hot air into the car that annoyingly blew wisps of my careful braid loose. I tapped the steering wheel impatiently at a red light, the song on the radio beginning its last bars. One pack of cigarettes was supposed to last a week, from the Tuesday afternoon I bought it to the next Tuesday morning when I ran out. One pack had always lasted for a week, but there I was on a Friday with an empty box and a nicotine craving. Somebody must’ve snitched some when I wasn’t looking, which was in my opinion incredibly unjust. Unlike other people, I didn’t have time to stop and pick some up whenever I wanted. I didn’t have time to waste in lounging the summer away.

I had responsibilities. I had a life. Or at least, I would have a life eventually. And it wasn’t going to be what everyone else here had: nothing.

“Well, news flash folks, the heat wave shows no sign of ending!” The guy on the radio, DJ something-or-other, was a master of the obvious. I didn’t know his name. I didn’t get to listen to music very often. “Hope everyone’s at home, draped over the air conditioner. I don’t know who’d be crazy enough to go out in this weather!”

I turned the radio off with a flick of the knob before making a right turn, irritated, and took a quick peek at my watch. The only reason I was going out in this weather at all was because I had a summer extra-credit history paper due in two days -- the day my last year of high school would begin – and I needed library references if I wanted a grade above a ninety-five. I hadn’t done it before because I’d come home from work late on my pre-scheduled Library Day and had fallen asleep on the couch. I was still hadn’t forgiven myself for that yet. When I woke up my parents had insisted on having me take a break. But they had plenty of time to take a break. They were stuck where they were, having already failed to get anywhere in their youth. As for me, I wasn’t about to take a break.

Plus I had to work at the grocery store that night; someone else had called in sick, and when the boss called me and asked if I could take the shift, for some obtuse reason my mouth had agreed. I hated it there. It wasn’t that the place sold spoiled food or something similarly newsworthy, but the air conditioning was always on so high you had an inkling of how it might feel if you were stuck in the Arctic Ocean in a life raft, while the bright fluorescent lighting made everything, including people, have a yellow-green tinge that made you squint and shut your eyes, praying for a power outage to save your vision. But people who worked with you made great resume references, and that was what I needed.

I slowed the car down, cruising at a cautious pace. You were always careful, when you made that right turn at the corner of 8th and Rome, for some inexplicable reason. It was like crossing an invisible divide that separated the two worlds of the same town. They and Us. Foreign and American. It wasn’t a class distinction based on money; we were all poor and we all knew it. It was everything else, from the murals in foreign languages that were splashed on almost every building with symbols I didn’t understand, to the flags of foreign nations that fluttered out the windows of apartments, the staffs taped to the brick with Scotch tape. Welcome to Old Westport, California, where nobody had a white picket fence or a brain. What we had was culture shock, a non-education, and people who didn’t care about anything else in the world other than hitting the beach or sitting at home watching reruns of I Love Lucy on a television with bad reception.

And my parents wondered why I wanted to get away. But of course they wouldn’t get it, two people who were completely content to stay in one place their entire lives and grow old, doing only what was expected of them and handed to them. By the time they realized how little they had made of their lives, they thought they were too old to do anything to change and shrugged it off. And sometimes, when my constant feeling of disgust for them transitioned itself into pity, I considered the idea that maybe they really were too old to change. Maybe when you aged a mental switch turned itself off and made you forget that things could be different. I wasn’t going to fall into the trap of stagnation, to die forgotten, just another wrinkly geezer. I didn’t want to be my parents.

I could see the store from the driver’ seat, and impulsively I took another peek at my watch. I always went to this one store out of necessity. It was the only one that sold the brand of cigarettes I liked. I wasn’t the best of friends with anyone who worked there, but I knew whose shift it would be, and he had come to expect me on Tuesdays. I always knew what I‘d see when I went in the afternoon -- a handful of customers because of the slow day, the cheap radio on the only countertop playing music in Spanish, the dirt, grime, and blessed routine. It was strangely disconcerting, going to this convenience store on the wrong day. There were even the same people outside each time; the small kids playing in the street (some time-wasting game I never paid attention to), and this one old lady.

This one lady always sat in a brown wicker chair that had seen better days, on the makeshift front porch of her apartment building. It wasn’t really a front porch, just a dirty mat on the ground outside the doorway, but she sat there with what looked like a staff in her hand, surveying the block with a placid detachment that made me think of rich people sitting on their canopied front stoop drinking tea and watching the little people filter past. I never stayed more than a few minutes in that neighborhood, but I knew she watched me intensely. I could feel her eyes boring holes in my back. She followed everyone with her eyes that way, just sat in that stupid chair and wasted time, another example of that mental off switch, I supposed. From the way nobody seemed to notice her, you’d think she had been sitting there forever. Even the kids playing ignored her.

I pulled into a makeshift parking lot made up of crooked lines that looked like they were etched with sidewalk chalk, and the engine sputtered before falling silent. Getting out of the car I looked around out of habit. The kids were there, and so was the old bag in the chair. The parking lot consisted of five open rectangles that a five year old could have drawn better, running over the cracks in the concrete that touched the graffitied brick wall of a one-story building with a sign over the door. The sign would have read, if all the letters had been present, CONVENIENCE STORE: CIGARETTES, BEER AND MEXICAN CATERING. Across the street was an almost identical store, differing only in that they specialized in Thai cuisine rather than Mexican, and down the street they specialized in Italian.

I could be in and out in less than five minutes. I pushed open the screen door and listened to the tinkling of the bell above it. There was a long tear in the screen, and chips of white paint flaked off into my palm. Stepping in, I brushed my hand against my shorts as the door slapped closed against the wooden frame.

Mistake. I glanced at my shorts in dismay. They were now smeared with flecks of white paint, dirt, and sweat. I fought the urge to push my sweaty hair out of my eyes and approached the counter, kicking up dust from the floor and swatting away the flies that came in through the tear in the screen door.

A few shoppers lingered in the store, browsing through the sagging shelves and ignoring the heat, and me. The shelves were disorganized and dusty, filled with some brand names and others I couldn’t have pronounced if I tried.

“Hi.” I didn’t know the girl who addressed me from behind the counter, and I felt a little foolish for expecting to recognize her. The girl spoke with a hint of an accent, and her tone radiated boredom, though was not unkindly. Her nametag on her fraying apron read LISA. “Haven’t seen you around here before.”

“I usually come here on a different day,” I said shortly.

“One of those routine people,” she said knowingly.

For some reason that annoyed me. “Whatever.”

“What do you need then?”

“A pack of --” I began, but at that moment the tinny sound of the bell rang again. Unconsciously both of us turned to see a hunched woman standing in the doorway, huddled under a mass of thick shawls in varying states of shabbiness, and after a puzzling moment, I recognized her as the Wicker Chair Lady. I’d never seen her up close before, and what I saw was startling.

It wasn’t the fact that this person was wearing several layers of thick clothing during a heat wave that was the strangest thing. The strangest thing was the look on her lined and leathery face, eyes red and lips pursed, which challenged someone to question why on earth she wore heavy clothing at all. A thin and gnarled hand was clutching a stick that might have been a lovely walking stick in a past life, but now looked like a smooth-ended piece of firewood. I could understand why the kids that played on the street didn’t want to look at her.

The expression of boredom on the counter-girl’s face vanished and was replaced by an expression of amusement and some relief. “Ay, grandmother!” the counter-girl, no, Lisa, exclaimed. “I was wondering when you would be coming in today. It’s later than usual.”

“I can come in whatever time I want.” Even the old woman’s voice was surprising, forceful but rhythmic, the kind that could make even the most crude language sound like a sweet song, but said clearly at the same time that it was a song you’d better shut up and listen to. “I was waiting for the hot air to cool off.”

Considering that the temperature was still well into the numbers that cause heat stroke, this statement was fairly ludicrous. But no one dared to disagree. The shoppers went back to roaming the small maze of aisles, and Lisa merely smiled. “You’re getting too old for the trip from your apartment to here.”

The old woman limped forward to the counter, her stick scattering the dust and flies like a blunt sword. I couldn’t help but stare, and the wizened lady ignored me in favor of scrutinizing the shelves behind the counter. “Five packs of that,” she instructed, shaking her stick at said packs while gripping the countertop, and almost whacking me in the knees in the process. “And hurry up with it.”

I felt my temper rise, infuriated that this old hag completely disregarded the fact that I was there at the counter in the stifling heat while she was still probably hobbling slowly from that idiot wicker chair across the street, but decided for the sake of her age to let the moment pass. Who knows, the lady might’ve had a heart attack or something if I contradicted her. I checked my watch again. I’d been planning to be back in my car and on the way to the library two precious minutes ago.

“Grandmother!” Lisa gives the grandmother a look of exasperation. “Every week, the same thing. You’re too old to have five packs of cigarettes!”

“Don’t tell me I’m too old for anything,” the old woman snapped. “Show some respect.”

“I’m telling you this for your health, grandmother.”

“Bah, my health,” the grandmother scoffed, and then adopted a purposely pathetic tone. “Why are you trying to take away my happiness when I’m old and will die anyway?”

Just give her the damn cigarettes already, I wanted to say.

Lisa took the packs from the shelf in resignation, and dropped them on the counter. “You want your usual bottle too?”

“Make it two bottles,” the grandmother said sharply. “You’ve driven me to it.”

And then, finally, she turned and noticed me for the first time. I tensed, not sure what exactly I was waiting for. Some old fashioned words of wisdom, maybe? Or a description of the Good Old Days?

“You’ve got a stain on your short pants,” she said curtly. “Clean it up. Untidy clothing in public is disgraceful.” And she focused her attention again on the counter, where alongside her five packs of cigarettes there were now two bottles of tequila.

I had the urge to tell her scathingly that she was not my mother, and why the hell did she think she could criticize my clothing when she had at least five heavy shawls over her shoulders in the middle of summer? But then I took a good look at her, a real look at her.

Her thinning, white-gray hair was stringy and coarse, but every strand had been carefully combed back and arranged meticulously. Her shawls were wrinkled and well work and as clean as shawls could be in a place coated with layers of dust and lint. She had laugh lines etched under her eyes, crisscrossing with the lines of stress and age.

For a moment, I didn’t know whether to laugh at her or cry with her. So I did nothing at all. I stood at the other end of the counter and watched silently as cashier-and-counter girl Lisa rang up the cigarettes and alcohol on the third-hand cash register that sputtered and jammed when she tried to open it to give the grandmother change. I watched as she rapped at the bottom left corner, and stepped back with the ease of long practice as the register sprang to life again. I watched as the grandmother primly refused to have someone carry the paper bag with her purchases, and I watched as she tottered out of the store unsteadily, the bag swinging on one bony arm and the other arm alternating between leaning on the walking stick and waving it carelessly.

“Okay, so what is it you need?” Lisa’s pointed question brought me back to reality.

Wordlessly I pointed to the shelf, to the pack I wanted. She dropped it on the counter as well, and began to ring it up. “Hot today,” she commented conversationally. All traces of her previous boredom were gone.

“That old woman,” I said suddenly, “your grandmother --”

“My grandmother?” Lisa looked at me in surprise. “She is not my grandmother. But she has lived here for as long as anyone can remember, so we all call her grandmother in respect.”

“She lives alone?”

Lisa was thoughtful. “I’m not sure. She comes in every Friday and buys five packs of cigarettes and a bottle or two of tequila. That’s all I know.” She waved a fly away. “She never goes further than that front stoop of her building, except to buy her things here.” Lisa leaned forward conspiratorially. “But the rumor is she was a wild girl in her youth, and even now she sneaks out late at night when everyone is sleeping to dance and chase men. She wears the shawls to hide her prettiness.”

I bought my cigarettes and left into the heat of the afternoon with a smile, taking off my watch and putting it into my pocket. I would do my history paper and go to work. But I’d reconsider that party invitation for tomorrow night that was sitting on top of my desk, coated with dust and ignored. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had fun, I thought suddenly, and it struck me how strange and sad that was. And when I came home, I would ask my parents how they had left their mark on the world, and when they suddenly decided that they had done enough.

I sauntered casually back to my car, thinking of old women that complain and drink by day, and dance and flirt by night.

~ End ~

Began: July 8, 2002

Completed: July 12, 2002