Help Yourself

Carrie takes her husband’s hand and steps off the boat onto the limestone wall of the canal.  Most people think it’s beautiful, her hometown, particularly in the summer. But Carrie’s throat begins to tighten as they cross the bridge and head toward the road that leads into the town.

    She allows herself to breath.  Soft, shallow, short breathes at first, then deeper.  Mouth closed.  She ends each one deliberately.  She is testing, gauging, like she is putting her toe in the water or letting the first layer of hot coffee touch her lips, before deciding to drink.

    Back in the city, she doesn’t have to think about this.  There, the memories are not floating in the air.  In the city, it’s as if she has been able to draw a thick velvet curtain across a window with an undesirable view.  But in the town she knows she won’t be able to control it.  It will be involuntary.  The memories will pass through and under her velvet curtain and float it aside like it is made of gauze.

   They continue up the road and the familiar summertime smells of grass and gasoline and water and melting asphalt are swirling toward her from every direction.  As she moves toward the pavement, she can feel the clear membrane of heat rising up.  It pushes against her skin and clings to her body.  She wishes it would surround her and seal her up.  She wishes it would protect her from the town’s falsely seductive summer perfume.

    She stops, and her husband, not noticing, moves forward without her.  He threads his way through the cars to the other side of the road.  When he looks back, she motions that she’ll stay here.  She is going to sit on the bench beside the water.

    From behind her come the cool sounds of the river.  She turns and sees three blonde children laughing and lining up to jump from the roof of a houseboat moored in the bay.  Each one catapults through the air and explodes the reflected images of trees, sky and boathouses that make up the river’s well-travelled face.  A man cries “Roll call!” from the back of the houseboat.  Beside him, a woman points as hands shoot out of the water.  One, two, three.  All present and accounted for.

    Carrie turns back and allows her gaze to rest upon the open space across the road, the place where she used to live.  It’s all gone now.  The Diner.  Her mother’s house. Even the trees are gone.  Only the beer store, her husband’s destination, is still standing.  Through the ribbons of heat, the Diner seems to re-appear, like a white clapboard mirage.  The red neon sign that said “Marie’s” is still flickering and humming on the roof.  A brown-skinned girl sips a coke at the counter on a hot summer day just like this one, listening to her mother talk to Marie, listening to the truck drivers tell stories about the road.