Published in American Writers Review, 2022.
Millie and Wayne met in the basement of 518 Seneca Street just over a year ago in early January when snow was crusty, and the virus was in China, nowhere else.
“Hey Freckles! Mind if I sit here?”
A lean handsome guy, with a recent haircut and unblemished jeans, loomed over Millie, grinning. He wore a green plaid shirt that smelled new and made his eyes iridescent.
“Be my guest,” Millie said, and she shuffled the metal chair over an inch, making room for him. A host of other replies came to her mind: “Sure!”, or “If you dare!”, or “It’s a free country, buster!” but in many ways, she did not believe it was a free country. Those with money made the rules and enforced them. And if you were black or a minority, forget it: justice was a pie in the sky that you barely saw before it disappeared into someone else’s kitchen. Wayne also believed that the country was not free, but more fervently.
That night at 518, Millie was celebrating a year of sobriety, and she felt ready to share. She wasn’t a gabber, she was a this is where I am, straight-forward person, and here’s a sense of where I will go. Wayne picked up on her energy and asked her out for coffee, and one thing led to another and before she realized it, she had moved out of her sober house and into his apartment. The apartment was out in the country over a garage, and it was cold and the carpet was old, but it had been two years since she’d slept with anyone. Millie held onto Wayne’s wrist all night long and felt his warm body besides hers. It was the most wonderful night of the past ten years of her life.
Next came the discovery phase. They found out they both wore double socks in winter and their favorite dish was black beans with tomatoes, garlic and cumin and with melted cheese. That put you in heaven. Millie was also a self-help devotee: Dr. Ruth, yoga with Adrienne, Dr. Weil, Medium, podcasts, meditation. Wayne associated self-help with subservience and a lack of independence. And because Millie’s brain was functioning better (she guessed about 80 percent better), she had started reading again.
“Why are you always reading?” Wayne said, one night after dinner. They both cleaned up together, another plus in Millie’s mind.
“How are you supposed to know about the world if you don’t read?” Millie noticed when she moved in that Wayne had no books—except for a dictionary because he was an obsessive on-line Scrabble player. Not even one paperback mystery, and she’d always assumed everyone loved a good murder story.
“What’s the point? Everything important comes over the internet.”
“The information is different,” Millie said. “It’s digested. Reflected and organized. And if the book is a novel, well most of the time, you can’t help but develop compassion for the protagonist. You know, the leading character?”
Wayne grunted, and returned to his computer where he spent a lot of time. He had over a thousand Facebook friends — so he told Millie. Millie guessed it was because of his friendly demeanor. Facebook would be just one more obligation, so Millie had no presence in that fiber optic realm. Still they cooked dinner together, cleaned together, and slept together. Then most mornings Millie drove off in her used Hyundai to a retirement community where she was a companion to an elderly woman named Naomi. Naomi and Millie played cards and watched TV. Millie taught Naomi yoga breathing, and then Millie would sit spellbound as Naomi related her adventures and close encounters that she and her sister (the rest of the family gone, murdered) had had with the Nazis. Naomi had a tattoo, but it wasn’t the conventional tattoo that the in crowd championed.
Millie did not know what Wayne did for a living. He was on his cell a lot, and always printing off documents, and recently maps, using Millie’s printer. He went through reams of paper. Maybe he was a salesman or a lawyer? She heard the words sue and lawsuit and legal. Or maybe he sold real estate? Even a drug dealer, she thought, noting the bolted steel locker in the garage. So what? No one was perfect, least of all Millie.
⁂
One night, about ten months into their relationship, as they sat around the rickety kitchen table, ambient temperature of 62 degrees, Wayne said: “Promise you’ll never leave me.”
Millie almost said, Till death do us part, but something stopped her. “Why would I want to leave you?” she said.
After that she started coming home from work in a quiet way, so you could not discern her footsteps ascending the outdoor wood stairway. It was not uncommon to hear Wayne on his cell, agitated, as if someone had taken his parking spot at 518, or exultant from winning at some kind of game. One morning on her way to work she almost backed over Wayne’s hunting gear. Since November, he’d spent Wednesdays at the shooting range, all day; on Saturdays he hunted. He must have been tired because he always tucked his guns and affiliated regalia away in the metal locker. As she moved his stuff, she noticed an American flag. What the hell, she thought, staring at it. Three stars?
Then Wayne had stopped calling her Freckles. That in itself wasn’t a deal breaker; the deal-breaker would have been if he’d said, “No more Omms here.”
Millie meditated every single morning, a 35-minute kriya mediation. She sat on the couch, turned on her app, and did ujjayi pranayama, bhastrika, the three Oms, circle breathing, then for the last ten minutes laid down and fell into a deep meditative state. It was in this state that her inner-therapist emerged.
“You think something’s going on.”
“Yes.”
“You need to trust your intuition.”
“My intuition says to leave.”
“Well?”
“I made a promise.”
“So?”
“I don’t want to be a promise breaker.”
“Hmmmm let’s see. Did you ever promise to return a phone call, and not return it?”
“At one time in my life I had made lots of promises.”
“Look, Millie, let’s cut to the straight: change is the way of the world. Climate changes, your neighbors change, you change the sheets on your bed. What’s the difference?”
“I don’t know.”
“People change all the time.”
“But if I break one promise, then I start breaking more, and before you know it, I’m drinking again.”
“That’s just plain stupid.”
“It is?”
“Don’t just sit there, Millie. Don’t be a fool. Find the evidence.”
⁂
It was January again, also the night of the decisive Scrabble Tournament. They’d each won four games, and tonight’s winner would buy takeout, winner’s choice of restaurant. Little did Wayne know that Millie had been generating lists of Z- and Qu-words using his dictionary. Not only that, but during the tournament, she managed to occupy every single red, triple-word square. Half of the time when she put down her letters, he said: “You just took my move!” She considered taking the move back, but she earned it. Equal rights for women: it was her own Me2 moment. And her last word, using all seven letters, she played on Wayne’s N. The word was S-E-D-I-T-I-O-N. That extra 50 points did it. And it would have been okay if Wayne had pouted, violating one of the Eight Characteristics of Emotionally Intelligent People, instead, he flung the Scrabble board so hard against the wall that the board ripped. Then he took his computer into the bedroom and closed the door and slept by himself.
Millie just sat there, meditation having trained her not to react, but to pause. Breathe. Maybe he was anxious about his hunting trip? He was leaving tomorrow. Good he was going, she thought, let him cool down some.
⁂
The next day was Wednesday, the day that Millie stayed until 9 pm at the retirement community. After dinner, as Millie and Naomi were watching TV, they saw the footage of the mob violently attacking the Capitol. The mob had spears, weapons, brightly-colored hats and flags. One flag had three stars on it.
“Breaking the glass,” Naomi said, looking sadly at Millie. “That’s how it started. Kristallnacht. 1938.”
⁂
When Millie got home, she threw some clothes and books into the two suitcases that she owned. She left behind some belongings, and a note telling Wayne her mom was sick. (She was.) Millie did not say she would return, because that would be lying, and lying would set her back. To her, truth was a matter of life and death.
Her mind was working right up there at 95 percent. It would be foolish to say she would not miss Wayne’s company, the comfort and economic security, and she wasn’t sure where she was going, but she knew for sure, that she would find a place.
Patricia Dutt 