"At the Corner of Madison and Union"
by Melanie Lynne Hauser
He was an old man. A very old man. Yet he walked as if he knew where he was going. No ambling, shuffling, confusing starts and stops. He swung his arms like a drill sergeant, marched with his head slightly forward, his eye tilted up, fixed on some far spot on the horizon.
His suit jacket was too big for him; his grizzled little head, topped with a jaunty brown fedora, poked up from massive shoulder pads like a turtle from its shell. And the material looked hot, dark and tweedy; far too heavy for this Indian Summer afternoon. Cars whizzed past him in both directions. Yet onward he marched, heedless of the tall grass and cattails and human discards - tennis shoes and fast food wrappers and the front panel from an old dishwasher. There was no sidewalk to ease his journey.
He soldiered on. He only stopped once or twice, to take his handkerchief from his breast pocket and mop his face, polished with perspiration.
= = = =
Eleanora Duffel saw him. She passed him in her Jeep Cherokee, gripped her steering wheel tight and gasped, "Oh Lord!"
She wondered if she should stop and assist him. The poor man! He was old! She tried to remember if there were any nursing homes around, for her first thought was that he must be an escapee.
But she didn't see how she could stop. Traffic was bad and anyway she was already half a mile down the road by now. Too hard to U-turn, and the intersections were a mess. She'd better just go on, for she had errands to run, and it was a Saturday afternoon so if she got home in time she just might sneak in a nap before dinner.
But she couldn't get that poor old black man out of her mind. What ever was he running away from? Nursing homes were bad sometimes, that was true. Hadn't she read about them in the paper, how so often the poor old people were left to just vegetate in their wheelchairs, how sometimes the bedsores were so bad they had to be hospitalized? Mrs. Duffel shuddered.
But he was dressed awfully dapper to be in a nursing home. That was true. A dapper old black gentleman - now wasn't that unusual out here in the suburbs? He looked like a city man. He looked like someone who hung around a barbershop all day talking with his dapper friends, all of them sitting around holding their hats between their knees and joshing about the good old days. They were probably all jazz musicians. Dapper old black gentlemen - maybe reminiscing about playing with Duke Ellington or Eubie Blake or one of those bluesy old acts. Maybe they'd all played in Harlem back when it was grand; maybe they'd known Josephine Baker and Cab Calloway and Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and -
And then Mrs. Duffel ran out of black musicians. So she started to wonder if maybe the old man wasn't a musician at all. Maybe he was an old family retainer.
She'd heard of those. She'd read Gone With the Wind. She'd seen Driving Miss Daisy. Fine old Southern families with loyal black - not servants, exactly; Mrs. Duffel couldn't bring herself to use the word "servant." She preferred "retainer."
Which reminded her -
"Oh, for goodness sake," she gasped. She slammed on her brakes and made a sharp right-hand turn into a parking lot, parked and trotted inside a low-slung building. Her big bulky purse bounced against her hip. She pushed open a door and inhaled the sharp, sweet scent of peppermint.
"Hello, Mrs. Duffel!" The receptionist smiled - a dazzling white smile, a living, breathing advertisement for Dr. Baker's tooth whitening treatment. Mrs. Duffel always wondered if the receptionists and dental hygienists got a discount. It made sense, when you thought of it; like when you see salespeople wearing the clothes they sell at a particular shop, or those Mary Kay ladies wearing lots of bright pink make-up, to match their bright pink Cadillacs, or when car salesmen drove fancy cars straight off the lot, or -
"Mrs. Duffel?"
"Oh, Patty! What a day!" Mrs. Duffel exhaled a bright laugh.
"Hot out?"
"Hot? Burning! Fry an egg kind of day, you know? And I just saw the most peculiar thing! An old man in a suit, walking along the highway with a hat on. On a day like this
- walking, mind you. All dressed up, smart as can be! What ever would a person like that be doing all by his lonesome, that's what I can't figure out. I've been puzzling it over and over, and it just doesn't make any sense to me -"
"Nice purse." A woman looked up from her magazine. Mrs. Duffel beamed.
"Oh, thank you! Well, I'll tell you a little secret." She lowered her voice. "It's not a purse!"
"No!"
"Yes! It's a diaper bag! Really! It is! Old, oh, so old! But I always thought it was kind of cute, you know? But of course, my daughters are mortified! They threaten to disown me. But they just don't get it, I can't let go of it, it reminds me of when they were -"
"Here for Sarah's retainer?" Patty interrupted, not unkindly. She was fond of Mrs. Duffel. But there were people standing in line behind her…
"Oh!" Mrs. Duffel blinked and blushed, ashamed. Oh, why did she do that? Just yammer on and on to people she barely knew? "Well, yes," she murmured so that Patty had to lean across the counter to hear. "Yes, I'm here to pick up Sarah's retainer. I just - well, I just hope she doesn't lose this one."
"Kids!" Patty shook her head and smiled, and Mrs. Duffel smiled back, and the bond between them - two middle-aged women with forgetful children - was restored.
Eleanora Duffel and her diaper bag climbed back into the Cherokee. She placed the plastic retainer container - why, wasn't that funny? Retainer container, retainer container, she sang it over and over in her head. She placed it on the passenger seat, next to a crumpled cheerleading outfit. Then she continued on her way.
But she no sooner pulled out onto the highway than she thought again of that poor black gentleman. And he was a gentleman, too. You could tell. Anyone wearing a hat like that - well, you just know he would lift it in greeting, remove it respectfully when entering a building. Southern black people - they had manners. Southern people in general did. Not like people up here. It's gentility, she mused. Generations of gentility - well, listen to her! "Generations of gentility. Retainer container, generations of gentility. My, I could have been a poet, and I do know it!" She chuckled. Was that black man a poet? No, not likely. She couldn't think of any black poets, really - oh! Except for that Maya Angelou! Now, she was a poet. And black.
But still, she didn't think that that smart old gentleman, so intent on getting somewhere - and fast - was a poet. He seemed like a worker to her. Retired, of course - he was old. Ancient. She wondered if he'd been a slave, then of course realized that he hadn't. But she did tend to wonder about that when she met black people. Were their grandparents slaves? Great-grandparents? It made her so sad, slavery. It made her ashamed of her heritage, of the otherwise admirable people who had made this country so fine and prosperous. She had seen Beloved, and though it had confused her, still she had felt so sad for Oprah. Roots - well, that was so much better. And The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman. She remembered seeing that back when she was in school, what was the name of that actress? She couldn't remember, but she did remember liking it very much. And feeling very sad for the slaves.
So was that old man descended from slaves? Did he carry that sadness with him? Was that why he was walking so fast, to try and outrun it, so he could live his last days in happiness and peace?
Mrs. Duffel, moved by her own amazingly profound thought, wiped away a fat tear.
Then she turned left into a strip mall without signaling, oblivious to the honking Ford Explorer that zoomed around her.
The dry cleaner's was hot. It was always hot, humid; the chemical smells so strong. Noisy, too - oh my! People shouting in the back, the rumbling huge clothes - rack - thingie, oh, you know, the thing that the clothes hang on and you press a button and it rotates around and you keep looking at the numbers and press the button again when it stops in front of you and -
Well, that was actually kind of clever, that. To tell the truth, she could stand and gaze at it for hours. What if they missed? They did, sometimes, like - see! Right now! And it had to go all the way around again, all the bright clothes in plastic wrappers. It was fascinating to see what finery other people wore - that beaded dress, for example. How elegant! But that green suit - well, it was so drab and ordinary, a wallflower among the festive party clothes. She felt like she was looking into a million strangers' closets, she felt mischievous and naughty - oh, look at that, obviously a bridesmaid's outfit with that bow. My, my, do brides still do that, make their best friends wear hideous Barbie clothes?
The rack stopped again. Mrs. Duffel sighed and fumbled in her diaper bag for her ticket. Of course she couldn't find it. But Joe, the owner's son, didn't mind.
" 'Sall right, Mrs. Duffel. We know you. Band uniform, right?" He gave her a big grin, and she had no choice but to compare the yellowness of his smile to the snowy whiteness of Patty's. But then, she assumed that working in your father's dry cleaning store when you were clearly over thirty meant that you probably couldn't afford very good dental care. Let alone whitening treatments.
"Thank you, Joe. Of course you know me! And here's another one!" She watched anxiously as he picked the cheerleading uniform up, one piece at a time, and held the short skirt a little too long for her taste. Joe looked like a nice enough man. He had an open face, cheerful. But chemicals - didn't they sometimes do odd things to the brain? Hadn't she read that somewhere? She prayed that she had never told Joe the name of her cheerleader daughter. She hoped he couldn't put a name to the skirt he was hanging up, the sleeveless sweater with the built-in bra, because if he could put a name to it then perhaps, in his chemically-enhanced imagination, he would follow it with a face, then an arm, and then a -
Well, goodness.
"You all right, Mrs. D?" Joe pinned a pink ticket to the sweater.
"What? Oh, yes, of course I am! It's so hot in here, though. How do you stand it? It's hot outside, and then hot in here - why, you never get a break. I hope your house is air conditioned, is it? We just have those window air conditioners, but they do the job, they keep the house cool, but oh, the noise! You can't hear yourself think for the noise. But who can afford central air? Maybe one day!"
"After you put those girls through college, aren't they getting about that age now?" Joe grinned and leaned on the counter - an invitation for a conversation if she'd ever seen one. (Invitation for a conversation! Invitation for a conversation, invitation for a conversation!)
"Yes, well." Mrs. Duffel sat her lips straight and frowned. She bent her head to concentrate on the check she was writing. Then she presented it to Joe with a stiff smile. She folded the band uniform over her arm and left the store without saying good-bye. Once inside the car, she put a hand to her forehead and felt damp; oh, it was so hot in there! Poor Joe, yes, really, she thought as she nosed her car out into traffic. Poor Joe, working in that hot place, already thirty; almost half his life over. Poor Joe.
And that poor, poor black man! Was he still walking? Should she go back and see? But
if she did, then what? She couldn't stop and ask him if he needed a ride, not in this day and age. Someone would probably think she was trying to kidnap him. Someone would probably call the police from a cell phone and before she knew it she'd be on the evening news.
Mrs. Duffel turned left at a stoplight. She parked, grabbed a shopping cart and entered the Giganto Food and Beverage Mart through the produce section, pausing a moment to search through her diaper bag - oh, that grocery list! Of course she couldn't find it. Of course she remembered leaving it on the kitchen counter.
"Oh, damn," Eleanora Duffel muttered. She pulled her cart over to one side so she could think.
A young couple strolled past, no cart, no list.
"Should we have tomatoes?" The woman asked, clasping her hands together at the thought. "Or cucumbers?" She twirled around and grabbed the man's arm, pulling him to her, ensnaring him in her excitement.
"Why not both?" He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She beamed and leaned up for a kiss, and Mrs. Duffel had to look away.
Oh, wasn't that sweet? Oh, they were so young, she felt like her heart would break for them. To be that in love, that excited at the prospect of shopping for vegetables. They were probably throwing a dinner party tonight, their first. And they were going to have both tomatoes and cucumbers in their salad! Good for them!
All of a sudden Mrs. Duffel longed to be invited to their party. She ached to belong at a table surrounded by such love, such care, such attention to detail. Tomatoes, or cucumbers? It wasn't a silly question; no, not at all. Mrs. Duffel understood that. There is a time in your life when vegetables are exciting. But when, precisely, does that time end? When does it all start being such a chore, the endless decisions, the putting away and tidying up of life? And when, she reflected, pushing her cart up and down the aisles, hardly noticing what she was grabbing, it was all so mechanical, all so rote -
When, precisely, had she started doing it all alone?
When they were newlyweds, Doug had sometimes accompanied her to the grocery store. They were playing house and he wanted to be part of the game, too. He used to take a great deal of pride in explaining to her how a lower price didn't necessarily mean a better bargain. You had to look at the size, he told her. You had to read the label.
Then labels stopped being important and he gave this errand up to her, just like so many others. But by then she had the girls and she sometimes had to use two carts - one to carry them, one to carry the groceries. Someone always cried. Someone always had to go to the potty. She remembered thinking that it would be heaven to go to the grocery store alone, to stop and browse the magazine section if she wanted to, to walk across the parking lot without feeling like she was driving a herd of cattle.
And now here she was. Alone and missing someone to share the joy of picking vegetables. She never quite counted on that - the lonely part of being alone.
At the check-out, she encountered the young couple once more. When the cashier gave them the total - $51.45! How sweet! - they both reached for their wallets. Then they looked at each other and laughed, and the woman put hers away, and the man made a great show of rolling his eyes and heaving his shoulders.
But he smiled, all the while. And he wouldn't allow the woman to push the cart out the door.
Mrs. Duffel paid for her groceries without any fanfare. She pushed the cart out to her car, unlocked it, deposited the grocery bags one by one, and dutifully parked the cart in one of those little corrals. Then she swung her car out onto the highway and pointed it in the direction of the old man.
She whizzed by all her previous stops: the dry cleaner's, the orthodontist. When she passed the point where she'd first spotted him - near that empty strip mall - she began to search left and right for a jaunty brown fedora.
But she never saw him. Right before she reached Union street she thought, daringly, of just continuing; of just driving forward, heedless of the groceries in the back, her daughters waiting, a dinner yet to be made yet already unappreciated. Oh, to just drive and drive! And she would find the old black man; she would stop the car and gently take his arm and drive him wherever he wanted to go. And they would talk. He would tell her of his youth spent in Harlem, his great-grandparents who sang old spirituals to him when he was a baby. And she would tell him of her busy days, her sleepless nights, her constant grasping after all the people in her house who never had any time for her yet seemed to demand all her time be spent for them. Dropping off, picking up, writing checks and filling out forms and soothing and clucking and generally making a lot of noise but yet never seeming to manage a coherent conversation, never seeming to make any of them, not one of them - Doug either, Doug especially - actually sit down and listen to her. And tell her back what it was that she was saying. Exactly. Word for word.
And then, when the two of them were done talking they would drive to that sweet young couple's house for dinner. They would eat salad from a beautiful wooden salad bowl that had been a wedding present. And the salad would have both tomato, and cucumber.
But almost before she knew what she was doing, Eleanora Duffel's left hand switched on the turn signal and her right foot pressed on the brake and she was turning right onto Union; was driving half a mile to a white brick house and lugging groceries through a front door smudged with fingerprints.
"I'm home," she called. A door slammed upstairs. "In case anyone was wondering?" She winced at the sound of her own silly voice, bouncing off the cabinets in her empty kitchen.
But as soon as the groceries were unloaded she heard footsteps and in a minute her kitchen was too full; too full of daughters, demanding, cranky, elbows at sharp angles to their narrow hips, ready to impale anyone who came too close.
"Mother! Did you get my band uniform?" Jen rolled her eyes in anticipation of her mother's failure.
"Yes, sweetie, it's right behind you on the chair!"
Jen snatched it and sashayed out of the kitchen, stopping first to grab a bag of potato chips.
"Don't eat those, don't you want dinner?"
Sarah sighed. "Oh, Mother, dinner? On a Saturday? Just let it go for once!"
"Well, people need to eat on Saturdays, too. I was going to make spaghetti-"
"I'm going to Claire's. Sorry." Sarah was already leaving, pulling her hair back into a sleek ponytail with the hair bands that Mrs. Duffel had just purchased.
"Well?" Mrs. Duffel turned to Miranda, who was poking through the groceries, a faint frown barely creasing her young forehead. "What are you looking for?"
"The raisins. Where are the raisins?"
"Raisins?" Mrs. Duffel tapped her nose with her finger and frowned.
"Yes, the raisins. Honestly, mother. I told you - I saw you write it down on your list. I need raisins for the rice pudding I have to make for Darryl. I just have to make it. It's his favorite! I told you, really. I know I did!" Hysterical tears threatened to smear her thick black mascara, which would then run down her face and ruin her foundation and blush and maybe even stain her sweater - and Mrs. Duffel had to do something about it. Who knows, once ruination begins, where it will stop?
"You - oh, sweetie, I forgot the list, I'm sor-"
"You forgot the list?" Miranda stopped crying with barely a sniffle; she lifted her eyebrows in exaggerated sarcasm instead. She was always doing this; trying on different emotions like new clothes, never quite satisfied, always searching for the one that fit. She folded her arms across her chest and cocked her head. "Really, Mother. I don't know what gets into you. What were you thinking of? What goes on inside your head? It's not like I asked you to name the gross national product of France!"
"Well, I -"
"Please, Mom?" Now Miranda flashed a dimple and wrinkled her nose. "Please? Can't you go back and get them? Just this once? For me?"
Mrs. Duffel stood in the middle of her kitchen, surrounded by empty grocery bags, dirty glasses and a daughter who needed raisins more than anything in the world.
"But I just - oh, all right." She sighed and grabbed her diaper bag. Miranda thanked her with a quick kiss, and Mrs. Duffel had to use all her self-control not to enfold her daughter into her arms and make her hold still, just for a moment. "Wouldn't you like to come with me, sweetheart?"
Amusement flickered across Miranda's face, pulled by a grand sweep of her hand as she ran it through her spiky hair. "No! I have to fix my lip gloss and start the rice pudding. He's coming over at seven!"
Mrs. Duffel nodded. Before she left she called out one last time. "I have to go back out! Doesn't anyone want to come with me?"
"Oh, Mother, get me some pens, won't you? I need black ball point for school, I forgot!" Sarah's voice floated down the stairs.
"Tampons," Jen wailed. "We need tampons - you forgot them, Mother. What ever were you thinking? What was on your mind?"
Mrs. Duffel opened her mouth, then clamped it tight. She climbed back into the Cherokee and started the engine - it was still warm. Then she rolled out of her driveway.
At the corner of Madison and Union, exhaustion caught up with Eleanora Duffel. Her shoulders sagged and her eyes felt heavy and she truly didn't know how on earth she would manage to push a shopping cart up and down the aisles of a grocery store. Her legs - she knew her legs would just give out. She had the funniest vision of sitting in the little seat at the front of the cart, sitting there feeling the cold metal beneath her thighs as her daughters pushed her through the endless aisles, buying her candy and magazines and ice cream, and then lifting her up out of the cart into the backseat and driving her home and putting everything away while she sat at the table, kicking her legs against a chair, eating her ice cream right out of the carton.
A horn honked. Mrs. Duffel looked up with a gasp - the light was green. But instead of turning left, she continued through the light and pulled into the parking lot of a convenience store.
"They'll surely have raisins and tampons," Mrs. Duffel whispered as she pushed through the door with her shoulder, careful not to touch the handle because who knew what kind of germs were in a place like this? A place that sold liquor and lottery tickets and magazines with busty women on the covers, along with deli sandwiches no person in his right mind would ever eat. "Surely they'll have raisins, at the very least." She walked up and down the narrow aisles, her eyes trained on unfamiliar shelves. Finally she located the raisins, and while she had reason to doubt their freshness she made herself not care. She found tampons, too, and a packet of black pens and when the total was rung by a beefy man wearing a short-sleeved shirt from which tufts of black underarm hair sprouted, she touched her fingers to her lips and felt nauseous. She wrote out a ridiculous check - just three items, and it cost her nearly twenty dollars! - and politely declined the receipt because she didn't want to touch anything else in this horrible, horrible store. Then she hurried out because all of a sudden she was ashamed of buying tampons from such a man.
= = = =
The old black gentleman stood against the building - mottled brick, sidewalk dotted with old chewing gum -and watched a woman rush out the door. Digging around in a floppy handbag, she was muttering something about produce - raisins, tomatoes, cucumbers. She was in a hurry, that was for certain. She had somewhere important to be, like all white people thought they did. Probably a board meeting or some charity event. Why else hadn't she stopped to see if he was all right after smashing the door directly into his left elbow, the one that gave him such grief of a morning?
But she didn't stop, just jumped into her car like there was a fire somewhere. Likely she didn't even know what she'd done - he rubbed his elbow ruefully. People in such a hurry nowadays. People not thinking about other people at all. Most likely she hadn't even seen him. People like that never do take the time to see other people.
He tossed his cigarette on the pavement, ground it with his heel. He adjusted his fedora and headed out to the road. The way back seemed longer somehow - and wasn't that always the way it was? Funny thing, that. The weeds clung to his pants and once his hat flew off his head and he grabbed it in a single deft movement propelled by a memory at least twenty years old. But still he walked, his head held high, a brand new pack of smokes in his pocket. Back to his family, who would be wondering why he left, where he'd gotten himself off to; most likely Angie was getting in her old Buick right now, coming to find him and take him home.
Most likely.