[Copyright, etc. etc., by John E. Simpson]
They’re out there, somewhere. Even though I’m writing this on a snack tray pulled up to my bedside, ten feet or so from any window; even though all the windows are shuttered and curtained so I couldn’t see outside even if I were anywhere near them; even though my phone’s disconnected, the TV’s unplugged and turned to face the living room wall; even though I’ve got furniture and appliances piled against the doors, and my ears stuffed with wadded-up Kleenex — even so, I know they’re out there. Headed this way.
—
I must have driven past the highway’s exit for Loveless fifty, a hundred times before I even saw the first bit of the town. I had family a couple states south of there, and I lived and worked a couple states to the north, so over the years I naturally drove up and down the interstate for holidays, funerals, weddings, and so on.
The highway exit signs are pretty undistinguished. You know how the signs for even nondescript towns often include some “point of interest,” however minor? I mean, besides the Gas/Food/Lodging variety. The way to one burg might be marked by a blue sign with a big white H and the words, County Medical Center.
So say you get a nosebleed in the middle of the night when some jackass in a tractor trailer cuts you off and your blood pressure shoots through the roof, as it were, and you follow the sign, and the dark road you get off on goes for miles until you come to a single-story complex with space for a couple dozen cars, tops, completely dark except for the sign that says County Medical Center. Maybe the M is burnt out. And that’s when you realize that the County Medical Center is just a group of doctors but any one of them, yes, will happily treat your nosebleed when they arrive at the office in just a few hours now. Or days, if you’re unlucky enough to show up there on a weekend.
Loveless doesn’t even have that much of a promotional sign. I guess the Chamber of Commerce, if there is such a thing, just hasn’t gotten around to it. Maybe they just don’t want visitors.
There’s one sign, Gas This Exit, and a little Amoco logo. And Food This Exit, Waffle Hut. Then there’s the word Loveless, and an arrow. That’s it. Not even any billboards a mile up the road, like Loveless Motel Next Exit. (Not that there is a Loveless Motel, understand.) I don’t remember when I first noticed the one little Loveless sign, but I must have thought something like Why would anyone name a town “Loveless”? Why would anyone live there?
But anyway, see, I’m headed home one February a year and change ago. My older brother had died a couple days before that — had a heart attack while carrying a box of lettuce across the back room of the supermarket where he was produce manager; had a heart attack and fell forward, actually broke his wrist a split-second or so after he was already dead, when he fell on it on the concrete floor. Heads of lettuce rolling away from him.
He’d stated in his will that he wanted to be cremated, so that’s what we, his wife and kids and I, did for him. When I left the crematorium to head home I stood for a couple moments outside my car, my hand on the roof, looking up at the sky, and something landed on my wrist. Something feather-light, something gray. Probably not really an ash, probably just a piece of miscellaneous fluff blown around in the breeze, but it freaked me out enough that I jumped into the car and took off without stopping at the diner on the way out of town, which is what I usually do. Did. Used to do.
I thought about my brother and almost nothing else for the next couple hours of driving. I was not especially close to the people I worked with, never married, even dated fitfully at best — my brother seemed to have gotten all the social-skills genes. When we were kids he was always careful to include me in his activities. He’d say, I’m going down to the pond skating, you want to come? and I’d go with him, never thinking it strange that while his friends were there, too, not one of them had brought his brother along.
It was not strange; it was cool. I thought this even when they’d stand around at a distance from us, looking at my brother and me, speaking inaudibly and laughing. He wanted me there, see? When he got married, after I’d moved away, when his kids came along, well by then of course it was no longer practical to depend on him for entertainment. He had a life completely apart from me and my life. But I knew there was still that same older-brother part of his mind where I lived; before our parents died, he’d call me a couple weeks before Thanksgiving, Christmas, family birthdays, and there would be his voice on the phone: We’re going over Mom and Dad’s for dinner, you want to come? Yeah, Mom and Dad asked me too. But my brother’s call constituted the official invitation. Not strange. Cool.
So I was thinking about all this kind of stuff on my way up the highway, bound for home after cremating my brother. Trying to imagine myself having a heart attack at the place where I worked. Sitting at the computer, my back to the door. Head slightly bowed. People walking by my cubicle for hours, not wanting to break my obvious concentration. Which of them would be the first? I wondered. Who would find me? Would he or she go find somebody else for help right away, or would the luckless discoverer stare at me, call my name, poke at me with a forefinger or ballpoint pen? Would all of them be upset at the fact of my dying, about me, or just about being suddenly and unsubtly reminded that the office isn’t as much an insulator as we all pretend?
It was dark and I was suddenly real hungry, and then I saw the sign: Food This Exit, Waffle Hut. Loveless. The arrow dizzily veering up and to the right.
There was the Waffle Hut, all right, a kind of vestigial tail attached to what looked like a former chain motel, the latter’s windows and doors now masked with heavy tape and plywood. But the Waffle Hut seemed cheery enough.
It was cheery enough, too, when I got inside. The time must have been eight o’clock or so, well after what you might call the family dinner hour. But there were a half-dozen families there anyhow, from Loveless or the interstate, five or six truckers on counter stools, and a handful of salesmen or lone travelers in booths, reading newspapers, smoking, watching the waitresses, watching me. Watching me. A jukebox against one wall was playing “Suspicious Minds,” but it wasn’t, you know, the Official Version. It sounded like Patsy Cline, crazy I know but that’s what it sounded like. Not loud, but soft and plaintive. Please Seat Yourself, said a sign with interchangeable letters by the door. (I wonder about those interchangeable letters now: Did the sign ever say anything else?) I sat in a booth in the corner, with big windows in the wall behind me and to my left.
The middle-aged waitress I had on that first visit to the Waffle Hut of Loveless wore a small, hard-plastic name tag which said SALLY. She sauntered over to my booth, placed a menu on the table, turned my coffee cup right-side up, and while she filled the cup with hot, dark liquid she asked, “Coffee?” I noticed that while she poured, she kept her left hand artlessly on her hip.
You know how people can be show-offs about some skill or talent they’ve got or some trick or vocabulary gem they’ve recently acquired, all the time pretending they’re being modest? Like, somebody taking a grad-school class will drop a Great Name irrelevantly into a conversation at a bar: We had to read this Roman guy Lucretius last week, not that I know anything about it, but one thing he said really stood out… Like that. It kind of clubs you over the head with how alive they are, how aware they are of their own aliveness, but with that not that I know anything about it they pretend to honor what they have in common with you, like not that either of us do.
That was what Sally’s hand on her hip while she poured coffee was like, only better. It was a graceful acknowledgment of something about herself and nothing else — even as she seemed to be displaying how well she poured coffee: Look, it said like an oh-by-the-way footnote, I have hips. They’re nice hips, too, very nice hips. She could have just left that left hand dangling down or held it behind her back, or she might have been missing her left arm and hand altogether, and her hips would have been just as nice. But you wouldn’t have noticed them, see?
And it had nothing to do with flirtation, nothing to do even with pouring your coffee, because the niceness of Sally’s hips had nothing to do with you. It was all Sally.
I smiled down at the now-full cup, looked up at her and said, “Sure. Guess I will have some coffee.”
She didn’t smile in return, though her face was friendly enough. She had little double-chevrons of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth that I took to be the residue of other times when she did smile, and imagined that she smiled a lot. (See? Double-chevrons. Not that I know anything about it.) “Want to order yet?”
“Well…” I glanced down at the typewritten menu sheet. I was really in the mood for a burger, but didn’t think the Waffle Hut offered anything like that. Nope. Waffles, pancakes, toast, eggs, sausage, bacon, or ham. I ordered an omelet “with everything” (not bothering to ask what everything might include), some bacon, and toast. “And some strawberry preserves.”
Putting the coffee pot on the table, Sally wrote it all down on a little pad that she’d pulled from the tight pocket over, yes, her hip. (Look…) “Okey-doke,” she said.
She picked up the pot and went off to the kitchen, stopping once to refill the cup of a burly, crewcut man at the next table. He was facing me, and I could read the logo stitched into the front of his grimy ball cap. VOLVO, it said, implausibly. He smiled up at Sally, she smiled down at him, she left his table, he picked up his cup, held it to his mouth, closed his eyes, and sipped. He opened his eyes and looked across the ten feet or so of space between us, and our eyes locked.
My face burning, I turned my head to look out the window.
The tall sodium-vapor lights over the Waffle Hut’s parking lot lent a peach-yellow cast to the trucks and cars parked beneath them. On the other side of the street was a darkened car lot, only the blue and white sign — Loveless Chevrolet — and a dozen or so cars and pickups giving any hint that the dealership was active. A piece down the street, I could see a row of storefronts, one of them (a pizzeria) lit up. Beyond that I couldn’t see much except some trees and what looked like houses on good-sized but not enormous lots. Then the street lights gave out somewhere in the distance, or maybe the street turned to the left or right, and everything further than that wasn’t visible in the dark.
I wonder how it feels to live in a place called Loveless, I thought.
Then Sally brought me my plate — “everything” meant peppers, onions, grated cheese, and an unhealthy dollop of what passed for chili, with a scrap of lettuce and tomato — and I stopped thinking about everything else for a while.
—
By now I know how it feels to live in a place called Loveless, and I know all about the storefronts and the Chevy dealership, and what’s past that bend in the road a half-mile past the Waffle Hut. But it took me a while to get here again, and to learn all those everyday (and otherwise) details.
I went back to work, of course. The few people there who knew that my brother had died murmured their sympathies, asked me if we had been close, and when I said yes and nothing else, they sort of shrugged and went back to their own cubicles. The people who didn’t really know me, let alone that my brother had died, probably assumed I’d simply been out for a few days of vacation or some mild medical problem, a touch of bronchitis or flu. Or a mental-health day, as they say.
Work had never meant a lot to me, and it felt even more pointless now. I found myself staring at the monitor for long passages of time, scrolling through documents too quickly to read them, the black text blurring on the white background into wisps of featherweight gray. Ash or fluff, it made no difference; dead for sure.
After a couple days of this I went into my boss’s office — like the Loveless waitress, her name was Sally, although I cannot for the life of me recall anything about her hips — and asked if I could take a month or two off. I had the time coming to me, and then some. I needed to regroup, or maybe just to group in the first place.
Sally was very gracious and sympathetic, immediately called to distribute my work among my colleagues, wished me well. She pursed her lips. “Were you close to your brother?” she said. “Yes,” I said.
I didn’t know what I was going to do. I didn’t feel like taking a “vacation,” you know, either of the tourist kind (scenery, wild vistas, historic places, casinos) or of the more adventurous sort (white-water rafting, scaling mountains, being dropped from an airplane or shot from a cannon). I wanted, I guess, to experience a different everyday life. To walk into a supermarket and not know which aisle the coffee filters were on. To pick up a local newspaper from the front porch and recognize none of the names in the headlines. All of my adult life I’d been looking in my shaving mirror, into eyes that had seen things that I knew about just because those eyes had seen those things. I wanted to see — to know about — some things other than everything that I knew I’d already seen.
And that’s when I thought of that other Sally, of the man in the Volvo cap, of a well-lighted pizzeria and a street of houses that faded into darkness.
I thought, Loveless. Why not? Just for the hell of it.
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