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How to Leave in April

by Erin Mullin 

 

You are supposed to be at work in half an hour. You know that you are the one who turns on the lights on most days and that it has never taken you less than forty minutes to get to work. On this particular day, you are not thinking about lights coming on so you change your hairstyle twice and pick out a special shirt, one with a cartoon of a rearing horse that says, “I got lucky in Kentucky” across the front. You whisper goodbye to the ghost in your bed and trudge up the stairs, then down the front steps. You notice a car parallel parked in the street that you have never seen before. It is a Jeep Cherokee from 1995 and it is grey, not green as it was in your dream. It does smell like vanilla bean car freshener, as it did in your dream. You reach into your deep canvas bag and fumble around bypassing a pack of cigarettes, a receipt from the coffee shop, a receipt from a yellow cab, To the Lighthouse, loose change, not quite laundry money, and an overripe banana before touching the cool metal of your unnecessarily large key ring, now heavier than it was a minute ago. Slippery yellow-green buds protrude from the patch of land supporting a small tree, tied to it a sign, “Don't be an asshole. Curb your dog!” Skip describing the weather on this day as it is unremarkable, though not at all unpleasant.

 

The exposed skin on the underside of your thigh sticks to the hot pleather of the seat. The expressway is congested and the racket from the neighboring cars frays the nerves at the base of your neck. A cabbie punching his horn punctuates your headache. Open your window two inches and listen to the strains of something off of the top 40 chart that will seep through. Mouth the words knowing that you are basically invisible.

 

While stopped in traffic dig for your cell phone in your same canvas bag only to realize that it is not there. It doesn’t matter. Keep left to stay on I-278E, follow signs for I-278, take exit 47, merge onto I-87, take exit 19 towards New York 28, at the traffic circle take the 1st exit onto NY-28W, exit the traffic circle onto NY-28W. Turn on Paula Abdul-- the CD is in a hot pink jewel case in the glove compartment, as it was when you were 10.  The car features a 6 disc changer. 1995. Watch the traffic peter off, watch the digits on the car’s external thermometer rise a degree every five seconds, take off your dumb Kentucky shirt when it hits 88 and watch it stop at 92 degrees, roll the windows all the way down with your left hand. Enjoy the feeling of warm air on your bare skin, as you did when you ran around on the front lawn in only soccer shorts.

 

On Main Street you begin to think about your mother’s strength. It disorients you to think of her unhappy though there was one time when you were the one to make her weep behind a closed door. If only you could remember why. Surely it was something small because you were not old enough to really know how to wound. But maybe that’s wrong and maybe children are the masters of that. What you do remember are the hardened drips of white paint on the door as you stood there, thinking “shoddy job”, only 4 feet from the floor, hearing turned up, wanting to run away but sticking to the floor. The feel of the low pile beige carpet with a faint stain from the time you got food poisoning and tried to run there for help but did not make it. Was the door closed then too?

 

Then, as fast as the thoughts of your mother come in, they disappear out the slightly open window, leaving you with a view of tall pines and a nagging residual pain at the base of your brain. Hope for that traffic cop to turn on her siren so that you can feel being seen by another human. Maybe press your foot to the pedal so that she will chase after you, hot with pursuit. You enjoy the chase but don’t overdo it. You reach for the banana at the bottom of your bag and once you secure it realize that you are not at all hungry. Stick it in the glove compartment. Maybe it will change if you put it away.

 

You stare out the windshield, dotted yellow lines melt and bend into each other. In them see yourself moving through the motions with early lovers. These are the holes you are filling in. Eyes closed, anonymous from head to foot and not quite hungry. Naked except for mismatched socks and not quite vulnerable. Eyes open, fixed on the plant atop the bedside table, “we could never be as beautiful as that”.

 

Later, reach into the glove compartment and find the banana is now an old receipt, someone else’s urgent handwriting climbing around the digits, 2.38 paid on the 19th for a large deli coffee.

 

Ichthys,

small fish on the bumper,

seventeen in the summer which meant

simply, sweaty palms and sticky eyes

floating in something synthesized, 

rhythym section, hoping for a tambourine

to bring us back

 

We were young, yeah, but old enough to...

 

You steer while I,

In the back between two boys,

suffocate in something musky from a spray can

armpit sweat, Bud Light breath and a lemon lime mint

Blowing past colors too quickly to name them

except that one and

I don’t know what that color means to me

I am pretty sure that you hate my taste in music

 

And I just couldn't help but love you

 

On Settlement Road, think of _______ and even though you are as beautiful as that exorcise the thought and destroy that filter for the time being. It is not relevant to the image of the neon green mountain projected on your mind. Judgement rushes in with more force than you used to try to keep it out but keep up and close the window to keep them out even if it is uncomfortably hot and it hurts to shut the window on love. You realize that you are in the car alone aside from Paula Abdul who has turned into Bonnie Raiit and sings, “You came along and showed me/ How to leave it all behind…”

 

 

 

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