by Katy Mayo-Hudson
After fifteen years of consideration, Lucy decided that a postcard would do. She shuffled out of the bus and crossed First Avenue, ducking in the rain. On Upper Post Alley she found an artsy tourist shop, and began thumbing through the rectangles in their neat sideways stacks in the rack by the door. She willed herself to not think about it too much – just close your eyes and choose! – after all, this was just a postcard, and the image need not mean too much, or anything really. It was just a postcard, half a card, much less than a letter – a passing thought sent towards a person, almost by accident.
After several minutes, her eyes alighted upon a card that confused her. It was a woman, her face divided in two beneath her nose with a shaky blue line. The top half was drawn in pastels and softness, the bottom half was a maddening swirl of black and lipstick red lines. Something in the face recalled Marian to her – the cool gaze of the eyes, the slim curve of the throat. She thought about Marian’s hands touching this card, the slimness of her fingertips, the way that her fingers curled so gracefully around the round of a wine glass that it looked as if it might fall. The thought of Marian’s touch brought goosebumps to her forearms. She hurried to the register, head down, card in hand.
Seated in a coffeeshop two doors away, she stirred her tea with slow ritual and picked up the pen she had selected before leaving the apartment. “Hi Mariane,” she began, and paused. She wanted the postcard to convey her collectedness, her recovery, a blunt contrast to the egg breaking way that they had ended. She frowned, scratching out the final E in Marian’s name, remembering that only Marian’s mother added the E, and bringing Frances into this conversation in any way could only make things worse. “Been meaning to send this for awhile. Where does the time go?” She liked the breezy tone, but wondered if it would sound strange – after all they had not spoken since that summer fifteen years ago – but she shook her head and continued, dogged to keep thought to a minimum.
“Dave and I are enjoying the area.” There, she had said it. She was with Dave. The Dave of golf lessons and French dip sandwiches on the back patio at the club. The Dave of first Marian’s bed, and then Lucy’s. The Dave who knew nothing, but was entwined in this story just the same.
“Things are starting to take off for us – Dave manages the golf course, which keeps him busy and our lives running.” A sick feeling welled up inside her as always happened when she lied. Dave managing the golf course, it was a hilarious thought really. He’d have to actually get dressed and sober up for a minute. But the biggest lie she knew was the optimism, the implied companionability of her marriage. But that is what this card was for, she realized, it was the final stitch on a wound, and only a stable, settled life with a regular storyline would lace it shut. The story began to pour out of her more freely now: “I’ve been working in editing but decided to move on to bigger opportunities (I mean more $). I’m studying to take my real estate test and am trying to get work with a large developer in the area.”
Lucy put down her pen and stared at what she had written. She drank a sip of her coffee, now lukewarm in its shallow cup. It was frighteningly easy to concoct a life, especially one that she knew would revolt Marian, with her beatnick ways. Marian had hated the club, the golf courses her father made her take that summer home from NYU. God, how they had laughed at the scoops of earth that Marian had excised from the manicured surface, how they had loved the long walks between holes and the clumps of forest that would hide two bodies pressed together.
She tasted bitterness in the back of her throat and added another packet of Splenda to her coffee. This had started out so constructive – a reach through the black silence of the past decade and a half– but now she could feel the pain bubbling up, the spite building in her hands. There was no place to go but deeper, further. She scrawled out three more sentences to punish Marian more, show her how resolved she was about this tidy life: “We bought a house in Poulsbo. Finally a place to permanently plop myself. Dave’s excited, I’m nervous.”
She stopped again, her underarms sticky with sweat. She was grateful that there was no return address expected on a postcard. She looked around the busy café, wondering if anyone had noticed her, and saw with relief that she was as anonymous as always. It was one of the perks of looking middle-aged at 35. Lucy smiled to herself, remembering with great clarity a walk that she had taken with Marian that summer on their way back to their parents’ respective beige stucco houses. They were laughing, pinkies linked, energy running through the loop of their fingers like liquid metal. They had stopped in front of a house painted a robin’s egg blue, its shutters open and calling to them like hands. They were hand-painted with birds in bright reds and purples, almost embarrassing in their ebullience. It was a house as joyful as this moment, as different from the other houses as they felt from the world. She remembered how the silence had grown still and pregnant between them as the moment crystallized, feeling suddenly that they had arrived home.
Lucy shifted in the hard seat. The card felt like a burden to her now, something she must write out of her like the angry words she wrote on post-its each morning and left on the refrigerator for Dave to ignore. “Take care”, she signed it, “Lucy”, and quickly copied down the address she had found on the internet. Sighing, she drained her cup and stood, static and empty. She felt herself cross the room and head out into the rain, headed towards the blue box on the corner. She knew that she would stand in front of it, its mouth open and waiting, and hesitate before deciding to not put the postcard in. She knew that Marian would know that all was revealed in the image, would smell the lies across the years and the gulf of country dividing them, would scoff and reject her again. There was no way to unload this burden, not via postcard or even via therapy. There was only silence and regret to bear, their constancy a violent, hidden ringing in her ears.
