Lady on a Park Bench

I have no way of knowing what her name is, but I first saw her while sitting on a park bench a few years ago. I was on the bench across a pond from her, green painted like the one she sat on. I, under an elm, and she under a walnut that stood behind us like ancient guardians of Brobdingnagian proportions. 

Her face is a blur, like a face in a Monet painting due to the distance, but I could tell she is roughly my age. She has blondish-brown hair and beautiful posture and she seems to love the color yellow, judging from what she wears. She often wears a hat, which I admire. Not a ball cap. A lady's hat. Women don't often wear hats anymore, or gloves, which to me is a pity.

She sits there and sometimes reads. Other times she eats what I presume to be a late lunch, perhaps tuna on rye, or fruit, or maybe a cheese sandwich. I don't imagine that she eats meat. Maybe she is a pescatarian. She is delicate in my view. Kind. Compassionate. Other times she just contemplatively looks at the water as I look at the water. Maybe we see the same thing. What lies beneath or within the shadows and the ripples. 

Between us, the aforementioned pond is roughly the size of a football field, in both width and distance. I wonder what she would compare it to, if perhaps, she is writing an account as I am in a secret journal I keep in the glove compartment of my car. I am like a teenage girl trying to conceal my confessions from a snoopy older sibling that would blackmail me with it at any given chance. She would not likely compare the pond to a football field, I know. Women are not as rudimentary and think of things differently than men. Perhaps she would say it was the size of a city street, or some department store that I've never heard of. Or perhaps a school playground she played on as a kid, or two Olympic-size pools juxtaposed to each other.  

The pond doesn't have a name, but it is emerald in color because of all the colossal trees that surround it which all have leaves like sheets of wallpaper hanging from branches that reach for for an embrace, all the varying hues of green you'd find in one of those enormous boxes of Crayola crayons the rich kids had in school. I never got more than 48. That's more than you need, mom would say. Those trees lend the pond their shade and they hunch over it like doting relatives over a newborn in a crib. It is a beautiful site to behold and there are a dozen other benches that surround the pond and ducks that come and go and people that cast fishing lines to extract from the water more than just fish. I am of a mind that people who fish, fish for more than just fish.

I get here shortly before she does every Monday at five. It is a ritual and it has carried on for three years nearly without fail from the first warm day of spring to the last decent day of fall. I come straight from the office. She has bested me a few times, though, arriving before me. I wonder if she smiles when she does. If she looks up from her book to see me arriving just after her, casting a triumphant grin towards me that I'll never see to appreciate. I wonder if she notices me at all. It seems silly to think she doesn't. That I am inconsequential. After three years it seems unlikely that she finds me menacing or the least bit objectionable or she would have chosen a different park or, at least, a different bench. Not one bench has a better view than any other, after all, and most are empty for people don't partake in such leisure anymore, it seems.  

I wonder what she does for a living and what color her eyes are. What crayon in that box they most closely resemble. What she smells like and the sound of her laughter. What song she sings in the shower. I wonder of the tone of her voice and what her hand would feel like upon mine, or mine upon hers the way old people hold hands in church. If it is soft and small, or callous from gardening. If her nails are manicured and painted or if they are short and natural. If she has children and of what she dreams. 

I don't often wonder if she thinks such of me, but sometimes I do. I wonder if she feels like a rabbit eyeing a fox from a safe distance, or if she is like the doe I've seen walk through that seems only to wait for an appropriate buck. Which am I to her? Does she look across and see me and think of a Monet painting for my face must be an impressionist blur to her unless her eyes are significantly better than mine. Simply a brush stroke of color — the hue of which affected by a smothering of shade or a spangled stream of sunlight.

Sometimes, as though to respectfully mimic her, I bring a book or a lunch as well, nonchalantly nibbling on a sandwich and some chips I extract carefully from a brown paper sack to show I have some etiquette and commonality with her. That I, too, eat and, on occasion, read. I borrow romance novels from the library just in case she comes over and sits next to me the way I long to go over and sit next to her. I imagine her to read romance novels, but maybe she abhors them and favors the classics as I do. Verse that sings with antiquated phrases and words rather than bludgeons you with the humdrum and schtick of pulsating parts and red velvet gloves. 

I don't know, though. My view of her is entirely based upon my assumptions, hopes and aspirations. I could be all wrong about everything. She could be insensitive and coarse, rather than polite and sweet. She could love horror novels and she might very well be bitter, or emphatically in love with someone else and daydreaming of him on this park bench. But my mind, selfish as it is, simply would not allow her to be anything other than what I dream of her to be. 

She never sits on a different bench, just as I do not. I wonder if she, like me, thinks she might jinx our reoccurring fortuitous encounter if she does. I wonder if she knows that she is my hope and I am something of the like to her. Perhaps, a character in a book she reads. The handsome mysterious stranger. She is a dream to me. A perfect and lasting dream upon whose blurry face I paint an aging but beautiful one. And in whom I bury my dreams and humanity like she is a treasure chest to be stowed away until the moment when I can be free and give myself to her. All of these gems of words and praises I've stowed up just for her. 

I look forward to Mondays more than any day of the week, just to be near her for an hour or so until she checks her watch as she does every time before she leaves. And when I see her car drive off, I get up to leave for the park has nothing left for me then. As splendid as it is, everything else pales in comparison.  

Clandestinely, I watch her through the tops of my eyes to see if she looks over towards me when she pulls away. But the lot where she parks is even further away and swathed in shadows, so I don't put much into the fact that I never see her glance over. I worry that if I miss one of our Monday encounters, she will not come again. She will miss the following week and whatever this is will fade like love inevitably fades after the honeymoon, at least, the kind of love that I've known. Real love, it seems, has eluded me. There has always been something missing. A vacancy in me that no one has ever filled. 

I have only missed a Monday when there were storms with thunder and lightening so fierce that it could strike one of those towering trees and break off a branch — a widowmaker, they call them. Even then, I drove to the park and parked in the lot and looked out my window just to see if I saw her in her white Jeep in the lot across from where I park. When it didn't come, I waited twenty minutes more and then drove home, feeling like I did when I was a kid and they cancelled a baseball game. 

Once I sat there in the lot and just listened to the sound of the storm and the rain pelt my car, writing in my journal, thinking about how the color and make of her car is an insight into her personality. A white Jeep says to me that she is clean and orderly, yet craves adventure she does not have in her daily life. She is innocent and pure at heart and in my mind she would never be anything less, even if she wasn't. Even if she was run through. If her history was plagued with the gravest of indecencies imaginable. She is infallible and perfect to me for perfection is merely a perception, nothing more. 

When it rains, the raindrops on the pond turn it a silverish color as the rain licks the water. I've sat in the rain without an umbrella a few times when she has been there across the pond under the dryness of an umbrella of her own. I thought if she looked, she might think of me mad as a hatter sitting there as I was, drenched. Or maybe she would admire my dedication to our date and she would come over and offer me a share of her umbrella. But she never did. Something keeps her on her bench as it keeps me on mine. She sat there and watched the water dimpled by the rain, umbrella in one hand, book in another. 

I happened to run across the same umbrella she had in a department store over the winter of the second year. I bought it and brought it with me the next time it rained, mid-to-late April, and I couldn't help but to smile at her, wondering if she was smiling back as I made a point to spin it like a pinwheel so she could see it was the same black-and-white umbrella, making the slightest hint of a joke from across the pond. 

I wonder if she laughed at me flaunting my umbrella like some bird of paradise dancing his best mating dance. It was the first time I made any sort of effort to communicate with her. Shortly thereafter, and despite the rain, she spun her umbrella as well and I knew that she at least saw me by her acknowledgement and that she too might think as I think, if not feel what I feel. The two of us alone in the park in heavy rain, twirling our umbrellas like fools. It was enough to sustain my happiness for months. It fed my spirit that was otherwise starved. 

I wanted to go over and talk to her. It was as good of an opportunity as ever. I wanted to talk to her from the moment I saw her first. To say hello and to perhaps sit by her and see the pond as she sees the pond and to see an empty bench where I now sit. Where there is a ghost of myself and nothing more. The desire to do so never left me across three years. 

I don't know what she looks like from an intimate distance or what she believes in. What her values are and what her dreams be. What religion she worships. If she is married or engaged, or if she is a lesbian without the slightest interest in men. Whether she was that rabbit or that doe. And whether I was that fox or the appropriate buck to her. But I didn't. I looked out across the pond to that statue of the town founder in the middle where the fountain is and I stayed where I was. Where I belonged. On a bench a blurry distance away. 

The founder of the town, immortalized on top of that grand zinc fountain, Ebeneezer Zane, watched us every Monday for the past three years. He hadn't missed a date. There he proudly stands with his chest and chin puffed out, his right hand in a fist burrowed against his breast, and his left hand pointing a long finger forever West. A hard man in zinc who saw what he wanted and took it — that people for fun try to hit with walnuts that fall from the nearby trees which led to the ominous sign along the pond that warns, "Throwing objects at the Ebeneezer Zane statue is considered vandalism, punishable by a $500 fine, and up to 6 months in jail."

I wondered what he would say about our affair. I imagine that he would tell me to be a man and go speak with her. To explore her as he fearlessly explored the frontier and that I am failing in my duty as a man just to sit here and dream. But I love to dream, I might counter. Dreams don't matter unless they're acted upon, he'd argue. Deep inside me, maybe I am afraid to be disappointed. That she might be like the others and no one would ever be any different. That there is no one single person, or destiny, or meant-to-be, or, at least, not one for me. As much as I professed to believe in all that, there was a hint of doubt in me. Someone pelting my psyche with walnuts of uncertainty. Or maybe I was just afraid to be rejected. To fall madly in love only to be bamboozled by a spurning I couldn't withstand after all my hopes and desires were built up so wondrously. 

Or perhaps I was afraid for the dream to be drunk and there to be nothing left to imbibe. Nothing left to look forward to on a Monday or any day besides the drivel of smalltalk and the monotony of daily life that is played over and over on tables of meatloaf and reruns of terrible TV shows in a world to which I wish to be immune. Among people I wish to be indifferent to. Of beer or liquor to numb it all. To give me a false sense of having that which I do not have. Of sports that are meaningless. Of holidays that are the same every year gobbled up and commercialized by corporations then packed away in a closet until next year. Everything is dull when you do not have one true person to share it with. 

But to be blunt, what keeps me on the bench is the fact that I am married, and my time for such love affairs with beautiful strangers was to have ceased twenty years ago. Barely had any been had, and the time was to end because I vowed such would end in a serious Catholic wedding in front of God, a priest, and all those pious figures on the stained-glass windows who stared down upon us with angry or tormented faces. It was as though I was joining their fraternity of anguish through a loveless marriage. 

My wife doesn't like the outdoors, or parks, or ponds, or ducks, or adventure, or intimacy, or me. She once feigned being romantic and in love because it was what she was taught to do in all the magazines and Meg Ryan movies. She became frugal and pragmatic as soon as she became pregnant and lost her sense of self with the excuse of being a responsible mother or an adult like her loveless Catholic parents, then cocooned and was reborn as an insufferable shrew with a heart as hard and opaque as Ebeneezer Zane's walnut-pelted zinc forehead.

I was mired in traditions of Christian loyalty. That suffocating loyalty I amassed in Sunday school and in services week after week, year after year. It was like a pillow over my face, a rope yoking me up like I was a mule. That which a gold band on my finger marked my eternal imprisonment and kept me on the opposing bench because nothing more could be had of it other than a sleazy affair that would never work out in anyone's favor. An affair that would simply cheapen what is and ruin the beautiful dream that has become and cast me amongst the adulterers — which was only a rung above the sodomites and the pedophiles.  

This beautiful stranger means more to me than whatever we could have in stolen moments of my marriage, however bleak it is and however bright those moments would be. And what if she has a husband and a marriage in similar despair? My approach and flirtation might render her confused with the knowledge that she too has chosen the wrong one for we are meant to be and to couple, and living in such confliction of being with the wrong one while the right one is but a park bench away is a maddening state, I can assure you, whereas, there is no conflict in dreams. 

Sometimes when I stare at old Ebeneezer long enough he tells me to be bold, to snuff my wife out with a pillow, or claim she is a witch and have her hung. He is unfamiliar with modern times, it seems. No, Ebeneezer, that I wouldn't do. It seems we have lost our sense of necessary brutality these days and are a bunch of weaklings. We are no longer so direct and harsh of our treatment of others that oppose or hinder us, rather, we are much like tofu. We are worms wiggling in the dirt of a world free of birds. I could not take my ring off and approach her like a scoundrel, nor could I sit across the pond with her while wearing it in good conscience. 

I could dissolve it or be disillusioned (sic) and pay whatever support, which is nothing less than a moral penalty, some judge deems necessary to be apart from my loveless wife and, possibly, with this woman I do not know at all who offers me only hope from afar. Ah — but for the kids. Our two beautiful children about to graduate. How many love stories have been unwritten by one's loyalty to his/her children? They couldn't suffer both a codfish mother and a disloyal cad of a father and become good people except for the rare happening that is always prefaced with the hackneyed adage of "despite their circumstance." 

So I knew I must suffer with someone and without someone so my kids would know that my love for them is greater than my love for myself. It was actual deprivation. Not like Lent where new-age Catholics give up social media or chocolate. A selfless man suffers only that which he deprives himself and one cannot be selfless if they do not live in a state of deprivation of one significant, or all, desire. And so it seemed best that after three years, I resign myself from this dream and stop dreaming it at all.  

It nearly killed me not to go the following Monday. I was sick in bed. Or the Monday after that. But I stopped going. I read a book on my front porch swing and my wife watched TV which blared loudly through the window. I invited her out to take a walk, but she complained it was too hot and her knees hurt. I invited her to sit on the swing, but she reminded me that she was allergic to mosquitoes and that I hadn't bought a bug zapper for her because I didn't want to kill the other bugs. The fireflies that danced across our front lawn, which me and the kids always enjoyed. They are like dreams that flash and disappear and flash and disappear again. Dreams that you cannot jar. 

I smiled and sighed and buried myself into my book and helped the kids with their homework. They were in high school, though, so they needed little help from me. My daughter asked me why I hadn't been going to the park on Mondays anymore. I answered her only with a hug. I don't want you to be like your mother, I wanted to tell her. I want you to dream and to love. There is no worse death than that of living without dreams or without love. 

I would pelt old Ebeneezer Zane with my wedding ring if it would magically make it possible that I could be unencumbered and this perfect stranger would acquiesce my proposal, however awkward and unsophisticated it was offered. But for reasons specified clearly, I refrained. I lived in the memory of the dream I was incapable of dreaming for eight hours a night in my own bed next to my wife who seemed to bleed me dry of hope as she snored and puled leaving me only with nightmares and bizarre dreams that made little sense. Her head gently sinking into the pillows so that all I had to do was to push down with one of her decorative ones with the lavender pillow shams that serve no other worldly purpose but to annoy me and to occupy space. But of that villainy, I also refrained, and so that murderous rogue I thankfully never became.  

It was months later when my wife told me that she never loved me, but we should stay married because of Mother Mary, and God, and The Pope, and the Catholic Church. For the sake of our eternal souls, she said. I had some waggish riposte on my tongue that I kept to myself. But I decided I had enough. It was all I could stand. I was a neutered protestant, after all, and twenty years of mass, standing and kneeling, was a torturous existence that I didn't wish to live any longer. Those stained-glass saints glared at me that Sunday. That last Sunday in that hellish church. 

I had all I could stand. I decided that I would pursue a divorce. I would be Henry VIII in the eyes of her strict-Catholic parents before I would live another day miserable for God or for anyone. They would look at me as though I was presenting them their daughter's head in a basket when I filed for divorce. But how they looked at me no longer mattered at all. It is what my wife wanted — she simply wanted to remain blameless in the eyes of the church. 

I went back to the park a few weeks later, months removed and well into the fall, precisely at five on a Monday, but the woman was no longer there. Not on a Monday, nor a Tuesday. Not on Wednesday, nor Thursday, nor Friday. The door had apparently closed. She was gone. I knew it to have been more special then — that she stopped coming when I did, but that was of little comfort to me because I was without her. I looked across the pond and there was only an empty bench on the other side. 

No one was around, so I chucked my wedding ring at Ebeneezer Zane and nearly hit him. It disappeared into the water with a simple yet profound plop. While some people throw walnuts for sport, others cast quarters or half dollars (silver only, the legend has it), and whosoever strikes Old Ebenezer gets a wish. I figured gold would work as well, thus, my offering. I don't know if she will ever come back, but I know I'll be coming here for the rest of my life in case she does, my pockets full of quarters. It is beautiful to hope she does, to dream the dream of her. It is still beautiful, even without her. 

My daughter came to the park with me the following Monday and we talked about the divorce. I told her I was sorry and she she said she was surprised we had stayed married for so long. "I love mom, but I would have divorced her years ago," she joked. 

I smiled at her and we joked about mass and our family's English Reformation and the abolishment of papal authority and how God works in mysterious ways. Then she told me that she had found my journal in the glove compartment of the car when she borrowed it and how she understood it. She understood me better because of it, she added. She grinned and gave me a hug and said what is meant to be will be. "No matter the circumstance," she added. "Things that should work out, will work out. And things that should not, shall not."

"There are 74 pages left in the journal," she added handing me the book. "Your story is not finished, dad. There is also a card in there for a counselor. I think you ought to make an appointment to see her."

"Kara, I don't need to see a counselor. I'm — " 

"Wait! Hear me out, dad. Her office is only a block away from yours. Her name is Olivia Brandt. She's 42. She has blondish-brown hair. Her favorite color is yellow. She loves hats and Monet. She drives a white Jeep. And she also loves the park, especially on Mondays. Not as much as she used to, though, it seems, but still. Oh, and she's recently single. Divorced in June. You're welcome."

"But how did you — "

"Dad. This is 2022. You live in like — 1982. Get with it!" 

I looked at the card and at my daughter. She nodded at me, smiling still, understanding fully the significance of her effort with her satisfied grin. 

"Everyone deserves to be happy, dad. What is it that you always told me when I was a kid and I was afraid or nervous about something that Ebenezer Zane out there said? Forward, boldly?" 

"Forward, boldly," I repeated, still gazing at the card.

We sat there for a while in peace and watched ducks swim upon the pond, a stoic fisherman cast his line, Ebeneezer Zane pointing forever West, and an occasional kid trying his best to hit him with a walnut.