What Does Your Tomorrow Look Like?
The two women decided to meet for lunch at the new Italian bistro in the mall. Between 12:30 and 1:00. They agreed via text while driving in to work. One friend to a law office on the square, the other to city hall. Everybody was talking about this Italian place. Bring your own garlic. Chance of rain negligible, after a week of downpours from an Atmospheric River, or something related to global warming. Correction: no, that doesn’t exist anymore.
Puddles in the parking lot. They used to play in puddles, as latchkey truants. The fire station across the street had just installed one of those baby drop-off chutes and already it had been used three times. Just imagine! What kind of world is this? Umbrellas abandoned on park benches. At least the word ‘galoshes’ was still in use. Their mothers, champions of appropriate footwear, would be happy. May they rest in pill-popping peace. Their late moms’ ashes were resting in plastic containers in the backseat of each woman’s car. Technically illegal, as any lawyer should know.
“Sorry, gotta cancel, a fast-track deportation review just got added to my docket.”
“That’s okay. I woke up with a cough.”
“Hope it’s not the latest variant. There’s no booster shot this year, what with vaccinations being officially out of favor.”
“Could be air quality, those wildfires in Canada.”
“Speaking of Canada, does your husband still want to emigrate?”
“No, he’s decided to stick his head in the sand. He signed us up for contra-dancing.”
Their phone calendars were examined and poked at. A date was identified two weeks hence. Coffee at that outdoor place on the rails-to-trails bike path.
“Around 8:30?”
“Let’s make it 9.”
Ambitious, because neither one had climbed on a bicycle, except for a stationary machine at the YMCA, since they rode together to high school. That was back in the last century. When lightning bugs flourished and book groups met in person and the newspaper was delivered to the front porch at dawn.
Being somewhat technologically challenged and perpetually exhausted, it was anybody’s guess whether this latest appointment information got saved in their calendars. Both women discretely struggled to stifle yawns in staff meetings. And occasional tears. Sleep had become a luxury with tax implications and sex was just too much work. As was the damn contra-dancing. That will cost you four balloons. Notification alert from the text thread shared with their husbands. Watch out! A secret scanner at the corner gas station ATM was stealing personal data, and a thousand customers had already been compromised.
Empty pop bottles rolled and rattled across the street and into the gutter. Their husbands, who otherwise couldn’t be more different, both doom scrolled late into the night, before donning CPAP masks. Did they realize their wives were running on fumes? Yes. No. Maybe. One was an eye doctor, the other a financial advisor who conducted most of his business on the golf course. Emergency Weather Advisory! The heat wave had intensified into a heat dome. Tornadoes possible. All tee times canceled. And, in other news, an executive order from the mayor required the homeless camps be removed from Centennial Park, which means an emergency-stay needed to be filed on behalf of the displaced.
“I’m really sorry. I have to beg off again. Duty calls.”
“Happens to the best of us. I’m stuck here at the garage anyway. My husband’s car just got towed in. He always drives with the ‘check engine’ light on, but when it started flashing, he should have known there was something wrong.”
“Kind of sweet that he would call you for help.”
“I thought so too. He sounded totally humiliated.”
Time to put the garden to bed and switch out the fall wardrobe. Forget about raking, such a quaint activity. A series of early frosts in September. Consider the leaves as mulch. They traded emails about shopping for cornmeal and maple syrup at the annual Covered Bridge Festival. The loss of daylight felt more ominous than usual. ‘Forest bathing’ continued to be a topic of discussion in the YMCA locker room, despite public radio PSA warnings of the Lone Star tick. Cautioning against hiking without bug spray. A graph of the latest wastewater numbers went viral.
“What does your tomorrow look like?”
“Like it will never come.”
From across the room, they waved and called to each other at the fundraiser for the animal shelter. They blew kisses and called out, “What about Thursday afternoon?”
“Maybe we could meet up at the dog park downtown.”
“Let ourselves run off leash.”
“I do miss our furry pals.”
“Bring a poop bag anyway, what with all the shit going down.”
It used to happen with some frequency. They’d sit on a bench and do crossword puzzles, while the hounds romped and chased their tails. However, both had recently lost their dogs to messy accidents, chasing deer into rush-hour streets. Too hard to discuss, too fraught, too angry at their spouses for not wanting another pet, because the kids are gone, and it’s easier to travel without one.
“Sorry about last week. I totally spaced our lunch. Please don’t say anything about early onset.”
“I had a dream about you.”
“Was it about running away to Chicago and becoming veterinarians?”
“No, why do you ask?”
“Don’t you remember? We were in trouble for something that happened at a sleepover. Fourth or fifth grade. A vase got broken. Our mothers were pissed and grounded us, and we hatched a plan to run away to Chicago.”
“No, I dreamed we were eating chocolate sundaes at the Penguin.”
Thus, their next officially scheduled rendezvous. Sugar consumption, when all else fails. It was a Saturday afternoon in late October. A football weekend. No parking places available anywhere. The line at the Penguin snaked around the block. Another of their husbands’ head-in-the-sand strategies: season football tickets and, worse yet, hosting the tailgates. Grilled peanut butter and jelly. Hopeless, really. Spilling wine on the stadium blankets and accidentally backing a truck into a row of port-o-lets.
Things were falling through the cracks. Watch out! Masked agents arresting kids in the schools. The women started wearing whistles, hanging from lanyards on their necks. PBS aired a segment on rising rates of breast cancer. Birdfeeders emptied overnight by urban deer, craning their necks up to devour the seed. One woman lost her phone, probably at the Y, and the other sent hers through the washing machine in a pants pocket. A motion to vacate was uncharacteristically misfiled. The property taxes were submitted late.
They spoke from the bathroom in their respective offices, using new devices. “Here’s an idea. Let’s meet at the protest rally next Friday on the square, I mean, if you’re planning to attend. We could do a pub crawl after.”
“Or get our nails done.”
“Understood. The barhopping idea was more something our mothers used to do.”
“I don’t know. Honestly, there seems to be a problem with us seeing each other, you know, actually getting together. Are you mad at me? Did I do something wrong to upset you?”
“No. I’ve been wondering the same thing. It seems that the universe does not want us to convene, that we’ve fallen into an isolation trap. Because something might happen if we do get together.”
“We might really run away to Chicago.”
“How about somewhere a little warmer?”
A faint train whistle floated through the crisp November evening. At the Amtrak station in nearby Effingham, ticketed passengers were allowed to leave their cars parked for a week. The two women hoisted their bags and boarded the overnight train for New Orleans. Both their mothers had expressed a wish for their ashes be scattered in the ocean. It was finally happening. The travelers tipped the porter, smiled for a photo and hugged their befuddled husbands goodbye. All aboard!
“Are you worried about the guys functioning alone without us?”
“Not my problem. I left the refrigerator stocked. If they need help, they can call 911.”
“They mentioned getting together for a drink.”
“Maybe they’ll discover they have more in common than they realize.”
“Bumps on a log.”
The husbands had been instructed not to take it personally if their wives didn’t return. Very funny. Initially perplexed and frustrated with doing their own laundry, the left-behinds met for dinner at the Italian bistro and tried to commiserate with philosophical reflections about girls being girls and how sometimes people just don’t realize what they truly need, until it’s right in front of their faces.
“Do you think the same applies to us?”
“I don’t know. What exactly are you getting at?”
“That there could be something that we’re not seeing.”
“Right in front of our faces, you mean?”
“With orange skin and wearing an obnoxious red cap.”
“Or that we don’t want to see.”
“Shit, and I’m supposed to be an eye doctor.”
~