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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
March 21, 2010
Published as fiction in a WIP
dated April 3, 2001.
© 2001 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Gulls, 1973
© 1973 by Bud Grossmann
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ONE SINGLE CIGARETTE
O
n the first Saturday morning in April, Gilbert Lowden took down the storm windows, washed and stored them, and put up the screens. He did it, without help, in about three hours’ time. He was just putting away the ladder when his neighbor Darrel Worzella came over to return a tile cutter and a bucket of other tools for setting ceramic squares. Gilbert offered a soda, and Darrel said he wouldn’t mind a Diet Anything. Gilbert found a Coke and a Diet Coke in the rusted, old, Harvest Gold Frigidaire in the garage. The two men, both in their fifties, both wearing workboots, jeans, and unzipped jackets, brought a pair of white plastic lawn chairs from the depths of the garage to the entrance, and set them just outside, in front of where Celeste Lowden’s Lexus would be parked if she were home, which she was not.
Darrel was a big guy. His hips spread the arms of the plastic chair as he gently set himself into it. He took a long swallow of his soda and placed the can on the asphalt by his feet. From his shirt pocket he brought out a soft-pack of Marlboros, fingernailed back the folded foil, and with two sharp thumps against the heel of his left hand persuaded a pair of cigarettes to come forth. As Darrel pulled out one and put it to his lips, Gilbert made a little murmur, sort of a subsonic syllable of longing.
Darrel arched his eyebrows and tipped the pack toward the smaller man. “Mmm!” said Gilbert, appreciatively, plucking the proffered cigarette.
Darrel flipped open his Zippo, and flicked the flint wheel. Both men lit up off a single flame. “Never saw you smoke before,” Darrel said. Each man took a deep first drag.
Pale sunlight pushed through the budding branches of a maple overhead. Gilbert slouched in his chair and lifted his face to the sky. He slowly expelled his smoke. With eyes closed, he spoke. “It’s been years.”
Gilbert sucked in another chestful and began to tell a story. “Last week Wednesday,” he said, “or whichever day it was, first truly warm day of spring, I was in my van, prob’ly two in the afternoon, on Liberty Parkway, stopped at a light. I was a car or two back from the crosswalk. My windows were down and I smelled smoke. Looked to my right, and there beside me’s this dark blue Toyota four-door, windows down, dent in the door. The woman driver is looking straight ahead. Her chin’s held high, she’s lookin’ down this long, thin nose, straight ahead. Kinda nice. Her arm’s out the window, wrist resting on the rear-view, and she’s holding a cigarette, fresh lit, little square-tip ash on it.”
Gilbert opened his eyes, looked at his own cigarette, flicked the ash onto the driveway, and closed his eyes again. “No one with her in the car. Me, too, I was all alone. This woman, white woman, very fair, was, I’d guess, late forties. Some lines by her eyes, but no gray in her hair. Black, black hair, tied back with a dark ribbon, with some hair straying at the temples and the neck. The Toyota top was weathered in a way that made me think, This is not a woman who would dye her hair. But what do I know? That’s what I was thinking: What do I know? She’s still staring straight out the windshield, and she brings in the cigarette, slow and slick, takes a hit, blows out the smoke, straight ahead. When she sucked the smoke, shadows showed in her cheeks, and just the way she held her chin high, the way her head went forward like a bird, relaxed, alert, made me think, This woman did not grow up here in Maryland, in the United States of America. All this is, like, ten, fifteen seconds I’m watching her. And then she turns and looks at me, and she gives me this great, big grin. Big, white teeth, pink gums showing above them. And I grin back and I say, silent, you know, ‘Hey! How are you?’ because, you see, Darrel, I realize, My God, it’s somebody I know! But I couldn’t remember her name. She’s the mother of a girl that was on the lacrosse team with Brittany. So it’s been, what, two, three years? And to tell you the truth, Darrel, I’m still not entirely positive she was who I thought she was. The light changed, and she was gone. Maybe she was someone else and she thought I was someone else, and we both smiled because we thought we knew each other from somewhere.”
Gilbert opened his eyes, sat up, flicked his ash. He took a tiny puff. He was just about reaching the filter. “Amazing,” he said. “Three hits and I’m dizzy. Sick. Ready to fall on my face. This stuff is good as grass!”
Darrel chuckled and stood up, disentangling himself from the chair. “Hey, Gil,” he said, “thanks for the tile tools. Come over later and see the floor. I think it turned out good. Bring Celeste.” He gulped down the last of his Diet Coke and crushed the can in his meaty hands.
Gilbert stood, too. He braced himself against the chair back. “Anna,” he said. “A few miles down the road, I remembered the woman’s name was Anna. From Georgia. Soviet Socialist Georgia, that’s where she was from.”
W
hen Gilbert went into the house, he left his boots and jacket just inside the door. In the kitchen he flipped the switch for the overhead light, but the room still seemed dim. He looked in the refrigerator for sandwich makings, but he decided maybe he should lie down for a minute.
In the nearest bedroom, the guest room where Celeste kept her sewing machine, Gilbert opened a window. He set his eyeglasses on the nightstand, stretched out on the bed, and tugged a quilt across his chest.
He wished he’d brushed his teeth. A painting on the wall shimmered and swayed. When Gilbert turned on his side, the mattress rose behind him, as if the bed meant to dump him onto the rug. He clutched the quilt so he wouldn’t fall. Then the bed settled to horizontal, and the sensation of motion began to seem pleasant. He drifted into a shallow sleep. A waterbed, and Celeste, decades in the past, sloshed into Gilbert Lowden’s thoughts.
The dream darkened and then lightened. Celeste evaporated. Anna appeared, with slender fingers pale as her cigarette. Her wrist was again draped over the rounded frame of the rear-view mirror of a car. In her pink-gummed grin, Anna’s teeth shone whiter than a smoker deserved.
Light. Dark. Light again. Anna and her dented Toyota dissolved into another traffic scene, another idling-at-a-stop-light. Hadn’t it happened once just this way? Hadn’t Gilbert recognized once before a woman he knew, alone in a car beside him? It was someone with whom he’d shared an affair that had faded into friendship but then had faded more. Years had gone by without a word between them, without a note, a phone call, without a chance encounter. Then one spring day in downtown Baltimore, he saw her again, at a light. Gilbert, in a van, recognized the once-loved woman below him, beside him, in a Buick to his left. The Buick’s windows were not open, but the glass was clean and only thinly tinted. Left-handed, the woman wore her wristwatch on the right, a detail long lost in Lowden’s memory. As Gilbert gazed upon her, the woman brought her right hand down from her steering wheel to smooth away a wrinkle from her skirt. That hand! That thigh!
And then, in the dream, as the traffic light changed to green, a gray reflection filled the Buick’s window, a pair of seagulls hovering with widespread wings. The dreamer strained to see beyond them, but the birds blurred. They became a pair of plastic lawn chairs, placed where, soon, Celeste would want to park. ♦
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This page was updated Sun, Mar 21, 2010, 12:39AM CDT
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© 2010 by Bud Grossmann
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