by Amy Shearn
Mrs. Atkinson
It is Mrs Shirley Atkinson who drives, her hair graying around her face. Something has broken inside of her. She is listening to the radio. The man on the radio is talking about the cost of living. She nods at what he is saying. He does not mean cost like Mrs Atkinson understands it, not the mornings one wakes up and knows everything is terribly wrong, but he is talking about numbers and credit cards. She is hearing what she wants to hear, and he is saying what he wants to say.
Mrs Atkinson is now scratching her arm. She is not scratching her arm like one does when one has an itch. She is scratching her arm like a woman who has just recently gone mad and wants to rub all the skin off her body, as if molting were ever an answer to anything. She watches Dodge City get smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror. She never drives this fast, even on the expressway. The expressway out of Dodge City is slick from all the tears of the people who have to leave so urgently that they drive like a bat out of hell at 3 o’clock in the morning, thinks Mrs Atkinson, although she knows it is really probably just the rain, which has just ended as silently as it began. It is the kind of rain one hardly notices until one sees how slick the expressway has become. Mrs Atkinson wonders why one never sees birds by the expressway. The more she wonders, the more it seems like there should be perfectly good reasons, but she can’t think of them now.
Mrs Atkinson’s married sister in California is expecting her first child, and has a spare bedroom, and was always the prettier one. Her husband cooks dinner for her when she is feeling ill or her feet hurt. They go to matinees with their couple friends, and the women talk about babies and the men talk about themselves. Mrs Atkinson, when she got into the car, thought she would go stay with them. But maybe, she thinks now, as she is driving and feeling the motion, maybe she won’t. Maybe she will just drive and be free and go to the ocean. She will put flowers in her hair and people will fall in love with her.
Now, Mrs Atkinson drives. It smells, in her car, of curls of dried mud and pine air freshener. She looks around at the things in the car with her. In the front seat is a crumpled mackintosh, lying there as if its inhabitant had just recently dissolved. Her purse is lying on the floor. Her purse was in the passenger seat, on the mackintosh, but someone else’s car had lurched in front of her quite suddenly and she had slammed on the brakes, and now her purse is on the floor. There is also, on the floor, a brown paper bag. There is a lunch in the brown paper bag : a peanut butter and potato chip sandwich, garlic matzoh crackers, some leftover chopped liver in a tupperware container, an orange (the kind that is hard to peel), and a bit of a chocolate bar wrapped in tin foil. This lunch was supposed to be for Mrs Atkinson’s son, for him to eat at school today, but she has taken it instead, so he will have to buy his lunch. In an hour or so, Mrs Atkinson’s stomach will trade nervous excitement for an empty hunger, and she will eat the lunch. Mrs Atkinson will realize, when she is eating the lunch, that she never has packed a drink in these lunches, and how very annoying it is to have a lunch without a drink.
When Mrs Atkinson realizes how annoying this lunch is without a drink, she will stop her car at one of those rest stops for truckers. She will be running her tongue over her teeth to make sure there is no peanut butter showing. When she steps out of her car it will be the first time she has stopped driving since she began at three o’clock in the morning. The clean inertia will stop just as silently as it began. She will squint into the belly of dawn, the soft pink sunrise raying across the sky like spilling punch. She will think how it never gets light or dark gradually in her house, back in Dodge City, because electric lights are always burning. She will step out of her car. The moon will still be hanging in the sky, looking very pale and squeamish.
In the rest stop, by the men’s bathroom, is a soda machine. It is there now and it will be there when Mrs Atkinson stops her car and steps out. It is the kind of soda machine that displays a can of each kind of soda in a little window, for some reason, and the cans in the window will be entombed in a skin of dust. This will make Mrs Atkinson’s stomach feel as though she is looking at a mausoleum for dead soda cans. Mrs Atkinson will observe the machine for a few moments, and then press the button that tells her she will get an orange soda. But she won’t get an orange soda. A coca-cola will come out of the machine instead.
Just as the coca-cola comes out of the machine, a man will come out of the bathroom. He too has been driving all night. He has been driving on a slick expressway, listening to talk radio. He has been driving a big truck filled with different kinds of prepackaged pastries and muffins. This man who will come out of the bathroom will have ugly fingers like those doughnuts that are called long johns, and will be wearing a sordid sort of look on his face, and skin like bad memories. He will look at Mrs Atkinson and ask her if she wants to have some fun. She will not say anything, although she almost will scream. He will ask her again if she wants to have some fun, moving closer. Her heart will beat against her ribs. She will turn around and run to her car.
This is when Mrs Atkinson will wish she hadn’t locked the car, and she will fumble, panicked, with her keys, although the truck man hasn’t moved from where he stood by the soda machine. She will not notice the magnificent swirling of the ravens overhead, or the fleshy beauty of the wheat fields that stretch out for miles. When she gets in the car, she will be holding back tears. She will forget all about her coca-cola. She will feel the need to pat her hair and straighten her clothes. The concrete walls of the rest stop will watch as her car (which bleeds rust around the doors and is missing a hub cap) speeds away. Mrs Shirley Atkinson will be heading back to Dodge City.
But that’s not for a little while yet. Mrs Atkinson hasn’t even started to eat the lunch. It is still dark, the bruise-like dark that exists as one leaves the ghostly un-dark of city and enters the deathly stillness of miles of wheat fields. Mrs Atkinson’s world at this point consists of driving in and out of the oblong patches of light from streetlights. The man on the radio has stopped talking. Now she is listening to the music he put on. This kind of music makes her heart race, but she hasn’t the will to change the station; it has, after all, gotten her this far. She is not thinking about her son, or the dogs, or the rumbling snore in her bedroom, or the morning newspaper, or the yellow wallpaper in the kitchen. She is thinking of this one vacation she went on with some girlfriends when she was eighteen years old. She didn’t know it then, but she was just a girl with a whole life ahead of her. She is thinking of lying on her back, floating on the reflection of the sun in a hotel swimming pool, and about the things she thought of then. She is not thinking, not even dreaming, of ever going back to Dodge City.