Typical...3

“This will be the last time you’ll have to worry with this.” Exactly a week before she had driven Michael back to the parking lot where the car he’d borrowed from a friend broke down. They had been playing at being cordial inside the strain that had encapsulated their marriage. This will be the last time you’ll have to worry with this. She’d heard him. The skin on the back of her neck prickled. She’d let it go by rationalizing that his friend would have the car towed and Michael would be on the bus from then on. She’d heard him, but didn’t know what there was to do at that point. Anita didn’t know how to say “I don’t love you, but I need you to stick around for a while so I can make the rent.”

She put her keys and purse down on the table to keep the letters company then swapped her dress, stockings, and heels for sweats and a t-shirt. Anita helped Terry change into pajamas. No bath that night. It was late. He was tired. The next day was Saturday anyway. And she just couldn’t, because something hard and hot had formed in her gut and was pushing its way up into her throat. Anita put Terry in her bed once he had talked himself to sleep as they sat on the couch entertaining the TV. She called her mother. Anita told her what happened; read each letter to her. They talked until Anita was nearly choking on the tumor expanding in her throat and the words her mother pressed into the universe. She hung up.

With Terry asleep, the apartment quiet and dark again, Anita was brought to her knees. The mass exploded from her mouth in a raging grief that scared her. She forced it to be quieter than it wanted to be; Terry was there. Anita had enough space in her heart to grieve for both of them, no need waking him up. Her sobs were not for lost love, she hadn’t been in love with Michael for some time; the fantasy of love had gone stale years back. She spilled tears for the betrayal and for the inquiries that had led her to disconnect from her mother: “Is it over? Can things be worked out?”  But mostly Anita cried, balled, because Michael could have taken Terry with him. That truth was what had her on the floor, dying from the lump of fear that had loosed itself from her gut. Whoever assisted Michael in his escape could have easily taken him to the nearby daycare and he would have had no problem signing their son out.

The phone rang. It was Michael. “Where are you?” He wouldn’t tell her. “What if something happens to Terry, how will I get in touch with you?” Michael refused to tell Anita where he was. She hung up on him. She didn’t cry anymore. All of the fear had drained out and Anita was left with rage. There she was: a twenty-five-year-old black woman with a small child, college educated, but underemployed, and alone. Abandoned. Like all of the stories of single mothers she had heard throughout high school and college. Her life had suddenly become unrecognizable, so very different from the image she’d painted as a teenager of the perfect marriage with five healthy children, an incessantly romantic husband, and a busy, thriving career. She was supposed to live an extraordinary life. Instead, she was just like so many other black women who had been left alone holding the bag, the baby, and the dollar that was supposed to, somehow, shelter, feed and clothe them. Typical. She was just that. In a day's time, her life had become a statistic; a mocking cliché.  Sitting on the floor in the dark that night, Anita began to work on an intricate hatred for Michael.

Copyright 2007  M. B. Levine

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