Depending
Last week on G-chat she typed to one of her friends from high school:
Me: It’s like an episode of Lost. I don’t know what the fuck is going on with him, but I keep watching to try and figure it out.
Shirley: Yeah, I can see that, I guess. But you should like get your mind onto something else.
Shirley: Or why don’t you just call him or something?
Me: Cause I don’t want to appear desperate. Cause I broke up with him.
But Molly was thinking, “I guess I can’t confide in you anymore.”
With Nate on her G-chat list, she could finally concentrate on her own work, doing website development for a multiple-sclerosis non-profit.
But two hours later, Nate’s icon switched from green to orange. He was out to lunch; his computer was asleep. Just in case he had to run home for something, she put her laptop down to watch the lunch crowd. “What if I actually see him?” she thought excitedly. “What would I do? I’d freak out. But I’d have to keep it cool. I’d like pretend I was out getting milk, or something that would sound spontaneous, I think,” she thought.
The first person she spotted was one of her regulars, an overweight woman who always wore leggings that showed off the sharp s-curve from her calf to ankle. About 15 minutes later, she’d reappear carrying a foam container, probably filled with fried foods and condiments, Molly thought. She named her Bernice, just for fun. Then a few minutes after Bernice left the intersection, the dog walker passed by with a herd of golden retrievers—the archetype family pet for the family-filled neighborhood. Usually a Honda would pull up in front of her corner deli and unload cases and cases of beer. That didn’t happen today.
By 1:15 Nate was back online. So Molly went to the kitchen to make a snack. Tuesday was green bean day. She opened her plastic wrapped package of pre-trimmed beans. Standing alone at the kitchen counter breaking off one pointy bean head after another was too depressing for her to handle. She would get bored and then her mind would drift like Tom Hanks in Castaway to an island of loneliness, pain and unrealistic love. It sucked too much. So she paid a little more for her veggies, and that she could afford. She dropped them in a pot of water, covered the pot and paced a few times across the living room before resorting back to her voyeuristic perch.
A homeless woman, who she had never noticed before, limped into view. She pushed a grocery cart filled with empty, recyclable bottles. Key Foods down the block gave 5-cents for each one. Usually the neighborhood bottle collector was an Asian woman who dug through the garbage wearing latex gloves. “I wonder if there are bottle deposit turf wars,” Molly thought, and then posted it on her Facebook status.
But then Molly’s cynicism cracked. The homeless woman had found a discarded, half-eaten piece of pizza. She stood there, on the corner, in the bright sunlight eating it like it was nothing. She looked brazen, bold and broken all at the same time. Molly was mesmerized. And so the beans were forgotten, until the woman pushed on down the block.
The green beans were overcooked. Now they laid brownish green and limp in a pile on a scratched, yellow plastic plate. It reminded her of dead bodies piled up in an anonymous mass grave, like the ones she saw in pictures of Haiti. It made her feel sad. “We don’t know what’s going to happen next, but we all know that we’re going to die,” she mused. Still she brought the beans to the itchy couch and ate them. And then she returned to work.
Until 3:20 when the school kids reappeared after classes. Their afternoon energy was boundless and yet unintimidating. She loved it. If anyone else showed up on the corner in droves shouting, laughing, clapping, rapping, she’d make sure her apartment door was locked. Not the kids. This was clean, pent up energy. Everything they said to each other was exciting and funny. It was all laughs and shouts of “Oh my god! No you didn’t!” In the afternoon, the kids took about 25 minutes to filter back underground to the train. But once they did, she returned to her work.
When, as she was looking—yes, as she was looking!—Nate’s G-chat icon went gray. She had actually watched him log off! She smiled gratified. “Hey, baby. I saw you,” she said out loud to nobody and hugged her knees into her chest. And then her adrenaline shot up, as though she had given herself an EpiPen injection. He should be walking by in about 25 minutes. “Oh my god,” she said. She hurried to the bathroom. Her hands shook as she grabbed hold of her toothbrush. Mouth clean, she removed her clothes and jumped in the shower. A quick shave of the arm pits (the legs were still acceptable) and she was out, dry and putting on her make-up within 7 minutes. By 5:36, she was wearing her tight, skinny jeans and her favorite fuzzy sweater. And then she rushed to the window to wait and see if Nate would appear.
