Gerald and Misty

Near 8 o'clock Gerald knocked on Misty’s trailer and the front door creaked open to a vision of her grandmother in a bathrobe. The woman didn’t speak; instead she simply left the door open behind her and sauntered back to the kitchen, lifted a pot of coffee from off a burner and gently poured the scalding black liquid into a mug atop a wooden particle board table in the kitchen. Light from an overhead lamp spilled onto the table and pooled into the lap of a man whose balding dark hair was pulled tautly back in a ponytail. The grandmother squatted into a seat next to the man, flexed her facial muscles into a serious, slightly pensive frown and ignored Gerald as he entered the small foyer. 

As if casing the place, which was larger and more spacious than it appeared from the outside, Gerald remained planted in the foyer space for what seemed like forever, and focused his attention to his right, anticipating that Misty would make herself visible at any moment. Her room was located at the end of a short hallway that exploded unexpectedly into two bedrooms behind the living room area. Misty and her sister Kathy each had her own room. The master bedroom, where their grandmother slept, was toward the opposite end of the trailer at the back of a longer corridor behind the kitchen and adjacent to the bathroom. Music from a classic Rock radio station floated from out of Misty’s bedroom and permeated through the silence and murmurs from the kitchen.

Gerald waited, until finally the man from the kitchen, who suddenly seemed almost familiar—Dwight Yoakom, he thought—said that he ought to just come on in, wasn’t nobody gonna make him feel at home, so should do it hisself. Gerald looked at the man’s balding crown and the way that he had his hair tied back. Beneath his breath, he muffled an idiom that he had no idea where he might have learned, Mister, if I could spare the spit I know just what I’d do. Then he cut across the living room, passed the television set, taking in a portrait of the resurrected Christ, framed against hardwood paneling, and entered the hallway to Misty’s bedroom where she was lying atop her comforter crying silently through unseeing eyes.

For a moment, he considered that he might bolt. But the thought of just walking away lacked a kind of clarity about the future that Gerald relished. "What’s the matter?" he said, taking a position on the bed and touching his hand to hers. Misty’s facial muscles began to articulate a faint smile, and a feeling of empowerment washed over him. "Tell me," he said, "does it have anything to do with that Dwight Yoakom look-a-like in the kitchen?"

Misty blinked and wiped her face with her hands leaving almost no trace of tears. "That’s my father," she said, angrily. " He’s here to tell me and my sister that our mother is dead. That they found her slumped up in a bathtub in a deserted building—a crack den probly—over on Noxon road near the projects. She was pushing a needle into her arm when she up and died right in the middle of a high."

Gerald wanted to smoke, but he couldn’t inside Misty’s home with her grandmother present, so he restrained himself and shook off the urge. Moving off the bed, he nudged the volume control on the radio with his index finger so that the music barely bubbled in the background. As he was contemplating what to do next, the door behind him creaked on its hinges and he turned his head to see Misty’s grandmother, Paula Jonas, standing in the doorway. "Your father has something he needs to talk to you about, Misty," she directed. "I think you should go and sit with him in the kitchen."

Misty left the room and went into the kitchen where she listened to her father through liquor-sweetened breath. "Lookee here," he said, handing her a newspaper clipping and delivering the news without uttering the mention of his wife’s name, and assuring Misty that it was all for the best. "She’d been sick in more ways than one for a long time."

The man took a sip from the coffee in front of him. An unfamiliar sensation began to course through Misty’s constitution; she felt like her veins were opening themselves up and expanding so that the hollows could receive the force of a foreign invasion. "Things is tough," he said. "They’s tough for you. Tough for me. Tough for Paula and your sister. Things are tough all over."

Nodding as if to convey that she understood that he was wise and she was penitent, she let the conversation end itself. Outside an unfamiliar engine began to rumble as tires smashed against the stone surface of the driveway and the honk of a horn signaled to her father that a friend had arrived. He grabbed his coat and exited.

As the door cracked to a close, Gerald and Paula appeared in the kitchen. Misty lifted herself from out of her seat behind the table and took Gerald's hand leading him obliviously past her grandmother out the front of the trailer to the car Gerald was driving. They pulled out of the driveway and headed south toward Route 9 back to Poughkeepsie. Silence hung in the air between them for long time, like a live thing ballooning up from unfathomable depths. Finally, Misty broke the quiet when she switched on the radio, tuning in a top 40 radio station and then—in a voice that hinted no signs of distress—she queried Gerald about what he might want to eat. "I’m famished," she said. "But I don’t have anything in particular in mind. I could eat whatever." About twenty minutes later they entered the parking lot of a Denny’s and went inside where they were greeted by a hostess and parked in a booth.

The place made Gerald acutely aware of geometry, rectangles and squares, tables and counter-tops. Seated at the counter was a small man—barely 4 feet high and half as wide—glowering before a pastrami sandwich and a copy of the Poughkeepsie Journal sprawled opened to the section with the horoscopes. He appeared to be staring blankly at the page, as if reading the same sentence again and again. Behind the counter was a a thickly built waitress, heavy in the hips, who insistently refilled his coffee every time he swallowed a sip regardless of how small. The waitress paid little attention to Gerald and Misty as they perused their menus and waited to place an order. When she finally arrived Gerald did his best to look to thoughtful and patient, even earnest as she loomed over them with her pen and pad, looking high and mighty, as if trying to see clear though to their thoughts, and appearing a little bit disgusted.

"What’ll it be, kids?" she said.

Gerald's throat constricted. He mouthed his order, barely audible. Knowingly, the waitress jotted down a tuna melt on rye with a side of fries and a cup of coffee—and an ashtray. Misty smiled and said nothing, waiting for the waitress to administer her full attention.

No response.

They appeared for a moment like combatants in a standoff, each non-response an aggressive assault. The waitress broke first. "What’ll it be, hun?" she said giving way. Misty didn’t miss a beat. "I’ll have what that midget is having," she said.

"Cash," the waitress said, half listening and turning her head 90 degrees toward the counter like the quarter turn of a globe on its axis. "What’r ya eating, doll?"

"Who wants to know?" said the midget.

"This young lady thinks what you’re eating looks appetizing."

"It ain’t," he said. "But it’s a Pastrami sandwich." Misty smiled.

"That’ll be fine."

Gerald tried to take a stab at small talk. But he was still feeling uneasy about having been thrust into an emotionally volatile situation, with no apparent warning. For the life of him, he couldn’t think of anything anecdotal. The force of circumstances had fully submerged him in the immediate present. He had no life past or future. There was only Misty and the here and now. And he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be here. Silence seemed to hang too long in the air and then, like a balloon, it popped and Gerald spoke.