Buses got me thinking. I closed my eyes and pictured Gray and me in a bath together, lit candles and peace of mind. I’d grown up to be a real woman. And then I pictured my secret self, a self that diminished and diminished until I didn’t exist at all, and I had no one to love. My face turned gaunt and sallow. I stopped looking in mirrors.
“All these fancy folks,” she said, “and nobody notices me. Isn’t that the way. Well, you must be a good looker.” She leaned in close, and I looked at her through the darkness, headlights sweeping her face.
“I mean, what do these people know? I’ve got a sick ma, I spend all Christmas trying to get her out of that darned trailer, come up to Boston with me. I’m just trying to get me some sleep on this bus, and this world’s just got to stick its finger in it. You know what I mean.”
I wanted to tell her she was loud, that people were looking, that we might get caught, but I was too nervous around her to think. I swallowed more brandy. My mouth was dry.
“Your mom’s sick?” I said.
“Sick as they come.”
We passed the brandy back and forth, sweet as syrup, and I drank each time she passed it to me against my better judgment, even though better judgment reigned in my life at that time, an organizing principle that seemed to make my decisions for me. After the first couple swallows the brandy no longer made me gag, and this is it, I thought, the moment when I cross to the other side of the mirror, to a path where leaving Gray was inevitable and I could get trashed on a bus with this mother, who drained the bottle and slipped her hand into mine.
“Where you wanna sleep?” she slurred when the bus pulled into South Station. They were unloading suitcases, and I spotted mine, blue with a bright-pink luggage tag, pulled to the curb. It was strange to see my pink tag, bought special for this trip, and it reminded me of so much that already seemed far behind me: Gray, the nursing conference, my booked hotel room, my home. I tripped down the aisle. I could barely move my legs. In those days I was one of those drinkers who could usually conceal their drunkenness. I was going to say drunks, but I’m not.
“I’m no dyke or anything,” she said, jamming her hands into her back pockets, rocking on her heels. “But if you need a place to land, you’re welcome.”
“I shouldn’t,” I said.
“Who’s judging?”
“You got a nice place?” She grabbed my bag from me and wheeled it through the station. I wondered who was watching us, but no one was. Most city people are hardly ever watching. I took out my cell phone and fumbled with it, thinking I should do something about Gray, but she was charging ahead of me. I didn’t want to lose sight of her hunting hat in the crowd, and anyway my eyes couldn’t focus on the text message from Gray that was up on the screen. I closed one eye, trying to read. Gray would call me seven times that night, wanting to know I made it in safe. He’d call the hotel, growing frantic when they said I never checked in. The next morning I’d try to soothe with half-truths: how I ran into an old friend, went out drinking, slept over. It all sounded blatantly like an affair.
We waited together on the subway platform, beside a movie poster where someone had blacked out all the actors’ eyes with marker. The cool, acrid breeze of the approaching train blew our hair.
She hung from the train’s handrail like it was a monkey bar. Her shirt rode up, and again I tried not to look at her stomach, at that long, pink scar.
“I love to stretch, you know? Keep fit. You don’t keep fit, you die.” Other people glanced at her as she swung. “That’s my ma’s problem. Sitting in that chair all day, falling asleep with her cigarette burning. She’s asking for it. Cigarette falls and she burns herself. She’s got scars all over her chest.” She laughed. Every time she laughed she coughed, phlegmy and raw. I could see myself reflected in the dark train window across the aisle. For a moment I pretended that she wasn’t with me, and that I was in league with every other polite commuter — work-weary women, tight lipped, in their black or gray coats, with their hands on the mouths of their purses.
“So what’s your problem?” she said.
When I didn’t acknowledge her she just asked me louder, swinging into the seat beside me.
“I don’t have a problem,” I said. When I’m drunk I have a hard time meeting people’s eyes, so I studied her stained white high tops. The shoes must have been one size too small, her big toes straining the fabric. I looked at her mouth. My mom’s front teeth had these tiny chips at the bottom, because when she was little she’d chew on bottle caps. This woman’s teeth didn’t have any chips.
I knew if I were a stranger on the train watching the two of us, I would think she was a homeless woman bothering a nice young girl. Maybe that’s true, I thought. Maybe there’s no home waiting on the other end of the train. I tried to conjure fear, her eerie, familiar face looming close, but fear had drained from me. I lifted my arm and let it flop heavily back into my lap. This was a test of drunkenness I’d always enjoyed, since I was fifteen and stole two swallows of lemon vodka from my grandpa’s cabinet. I lay in bed afterward, lifting my hand and letting it fall, my heavy head lolling on the pillow.
“She’s gone quiet on me, folks,” she said, but this time her voice was low, just for us. She had a spitty way of enunciating her words that drinkers I’ve known share.
“So you’ve got a nice place?” I said.
“Well, it’s a work in progress. But I’d stay there all day if I could. I’m worse than Ma about my house. My house is the only thing in my life that hasn’t betrayed me.”
“I’m sorry to be rude,” I said, “but I forgot your name.”
“Here we’re having a sleepover and you don’t even know my name. It’s Cheryl. Try and remember this time. Like cherry.”
“Like cherries,” I repeated. I couldn’t recall her telling me her name. My mother’s name was Flora, is Flora, if she’s still alive. People called her Flor. She hated the nickname. “I mop floors,” she said. “My name is flowers.” I imagined Mom would like to be renamed Cherry. I thought how I would like a name like that, if only for one night. My name is plain Dora. Door. I imagined knotting a cherry stem with my tongue.
The train lurched back and forth, yanking our bodies. It seemed to be going faster than it should, stations whipping past in seconds, faces blurred. I wondered if the train operator ever went rogue, skipping stops in the dark, dead-end tunnel.
Cheryl had a real house. It was brick and squat, half-covered in dead climbing vine. The lawn was gravel but there was a garden plot, and inside the garden plastic plant containers, the plant’s yellowed leaves spilling out over the snow. There was a swan planter in the garden, its long neck ringed with rust. Bars on the windows, and behind them shadows and flickering light. A face appeared in the window and then disappeared again behind the orange curtain.
Her home was not what I’d expected. I expected a sort of homelessness within a home, yanked-up carpet and leaky ceilings, boxes of delusional junk — plastic horses, clown ashtrays, thirty packs of mop heads — stacked to the ceilings. In reality her home was cold and spotless, lit by scented candles. There was a plastic cover over the couch, and I could see evidence of recent vacuuming in the weft of the carpet. She kept lovebirds, but their cage was clean. One of them made a soft cooing noise in its sleep.