Sitting and Standing
It’s a Thursday, and today I’m sitting inside a coffee shop downtown, called the Wormhole. Up and down Milwaukee Avenue, people are hustling to their jobs and their lives so quickly that they don’t have the chance to glance through the windows. It’s a safe day to sit down and lean against the windowsill and the glass and just watch. You can’t do this as much on Sundays, don’t get the same pleasure out of it, because people usually have the time to look back at you and then you really can’t stare or wonder who they are. I’ve never been to this shop before, but it’s got an older feel in both its looks and its senses. I guess I’ve grown more mature from when we last spoke. This woman across from me has thin wrists, and right above the joint on her left rests a pearl-faced watch. I don’t think I would have noticed but it’s got this chartreuse band that I would have never picked out for you, and the seconds hand has quite a loud tick.
The clock above my grandfather’s plush yellow chair used to tick to the rhythm of his wife’s heartbeat. He’d programmed it like that when they were twenty-one before he was going off to fight in the Second World War. He told her he was coming back but that regardless of what happened, her heart would keep beating for him. The clock hung across from an old antique bomb chest, the kind that was made of cherry wood. It had been hand-painted by delicate Asian hands in a shop on Gerard Street. Across the body of the chest swirled glossy blossoms, like ones that my grandmother’s fingernails were freshly adorned with on Thursdays when she’d come home from the manicurist. She used to say that Thursday was the best day because it was the day closest to Friday, another day of celebration. but I never really got that because if she liked Fridays so much that the best part of Thursday was to celebrate Friday, wasn’t Friday the best day by default?
On top of the chest sat an old Zenith Stratosphere radio. That thing was always on and tuned to WLS radio, which broadcasted from the Sherman House Hotel in downtown Chicago. At the time, Sears was making it big in retail, and so the call letters WLS actually stood for World’s Largest Store. Hell, what a marketing campaign when there were only three stations to listen to in Chicago in the ‘30s. But the station was geared towards the farmers of the rural Midwest, and they’d broadcast a program named National Barn Dance. Gene Autry, who everyone called the Singing Cowboy, would come in and sing songs like Take Me Back to My Boots and Saddle. I remember this was funny though because my grandparents lived in the city and really didn’t think much of Western lifestyle. Oh, it’s just background noise, that’s what my grandmother would say when I asked why they listened to only that station.
And I remember, years later, sitting across from you in a restaurant now called North Lancaster Central. Back then it was called the Yelling Goat, but they recently changed the name because they thought it was deterring people. You had tiny cherry blossoms painted on top your dainty fingernails, but only on the ring fingers, the rest were tipped with French white. You liked to experiment with the wine menu there and never settled on any particular color or blend. As we’d talk, your fingers would trace from the bottom of the glass to the stem, turning ever so slightly as if to admire the shape of the wine in its glass. You used to wear these floaty dresses that’d fan out at the bottom and hit right in the middle of your shins. They looked nice and gave you the appearance that you had wealth. You’d joke about how you had to eat baked potatoes for dinner every night because you couldn’t just window shop because you fell in love too easily. Now that I think about it though, the dresses were nothing ornate. Don’t get me wrong, you looked beautiful in them, but other women wore the same thing. There was something else about you.
You used to drink absinthe during the week. On Wednesdays, you’d pour yourself a stiff glass with lunch because you made it through the first half. Sometimes you’d forget what day of the week it was, and Wednesday would start on Tuesday. But you never missed a beat. You’d pack me turkey sandwiches wrapped in doily napkins when I worked downtown, and when I went off to school in Michigan, you’d mail me letters even though I’d see you on the weekend. Yeah, there was something about you.
The ticking of the thin woman’s watch pulls me back a little, and now she’s noticing that I’ve got my eyes just fixed on her wrists and she can’t stop staring. You would know what to say you really would.
“The chartreuse. I -- I just liked the chartreuse.”
November 2019