The Girl from Haverhill

It had rained heavily in Boston that muggy afternoon, but the afternoon passed and took with it the rain. It was cooler now and the bricks on the sidewalks were washed clean and people began to return from the cover of opportune doorframes, awnings, or from bars where they had ducked for cover not wanting to meet the fate of James Otis. That was when the thunder cracked and the lightning gleamed through the ill-omened black clouds. Otis, a patriot, was struck dead under similar circumstances in 1778 and never realized American independence. I thought of the sadness in his untimely death earlier while standing before his modest grave that was but a rock with a plaque stuck to it. Graves were so much cooler then—skulls and crossbones, and ominous Devils with upturned hourglasses, old Father Times, etched by someone’s hand and not by a machine. But few in Boston know James Otis and no one knows me. Those that were stuck out in the rain, or who cared not to take cover, were strutting around casually with clothes stuck to their skin as though nothing mattered and with the proud fearlessness of those not afraid of death by lightning bolt.

Saturday evening traffic was thick and I was scrambling across busy street blocks congested with taxis full of tourists and ancient pedestrians walking to the Garden like pilgrims to the mecca of a Neil Diamond concert. I was searching for flowers, preferably red roses—the fatter the better. I had been told never to trust a girl whose favorite flowers were red roses and perhaps I should have heeded that advice. But like most good advice I had been given, it fell on deaf ears. She was the one, I swore. Love was in the basket.

I had already bought my tickets at North Station, which I tucked in that jeans pocket which is never used and seems to have no purpose. It amused me for a moment to give it purpose. I kept the Garden in view so not to get miserably lost. I searched for those roses while keeping my eye on my watch. The train for Andover left at 8:40pm and I had only a few more desperate minutes to spare. I stopped to ask a man dressed up in colonial clothing if he knew where I could buy red roses but he shook his head no and continued taking drags of his cigarette and texting someone on his cell phone nearly indifferent to my interruption. He muttered something to the effect that he was off work now and had no further obligation to tourists. My heart ached in my failure as I returned to the Garden that began to clear out as the evening waned and as the Neil Diamond fans were taking their seats somewhere above me. The Haverhill train was the last departure for an hour, so the waiting area was sparsely populated and I took my ticket from that once purposeless pocket and slouched on a bench seat. My phone vibrated and the girl who loved red roses asked when I expected to be in Andover to talk. “In an hour or less,” I typed. “K,” she returned with her thumbs. She knew I hated when she said that but she stuck it in me at any given opportunity.

I hadn’t noticed my company on the bench. What did it matter? I lifted my head somberly out of my hands and looked over to see the beautiful young woman who could have been a little older, or perhaps younger than twenty-one. She was slender with strawberry-blonde hair and freckles on her shoulders. She wore a tank top, skinny jeans and sandals, the colors of which have faded from memory. She was a beautiful stranger, the sort of person or thing who makes you believe in the world again, in life again. Beauty that is not molested by the carnal sins of the mind, a woman you would prefer to see doing anything, who seemed so peacefully to be without doubt or sin. She smiled at me sympathetically seeming to understand the quandary of the gadget that caused my desolation. She thumbed the keypad of her own device very delicately offering it a series of beautiful half-smiles and kind looks. I smiled back dreadfully delayed for my mind was horribly teeming with my present predicament with the girl at the other end. I assumed this stranger was texting her mother, a fortunate boyfriend, or some relative, and that at the other end of her train ride there would be a happy ending and not the execution or whatever inevitable end that surely awaited me.

“Am I coming to my funeral?” my thumbs typed.

“No, no, no. Nothing like that,” the girl reassured me. But I had lied and there is always some consequence of lying however great or small and however insufferable. She assured me the lie that I told was being considered and could possibly be forgiven but she promised me nothing and made harsh jokes because my mistake afforded her the luxury of saying or doing what she pleased. It was not an egregious lie, nothing with malicious intent, nor was it about any sort of infidelity. But it was no less a lie and, in my defense, told in self-preservation; given the definition of self is love. Man truly must be his own counsel in the courtroom of personal examination where the docket is always full. But this wasn’t up to me. I had already found myself not guilty by reason of having good cause. Nonetheless, despite her assurances for a fair and impartial judgment based upon the facts of the matter, she seemed like a deliberating jury of old white men and I have never felt so black in my life.

In five minutes this beautiful stranger was my salve on wounds that felt years deep. For whatever reason, without saying a word she put me at ease and I no longer felt like a man about to be buried but rather as though my  sentence had been commuted, if only for a while. She was nothing short of Mother Theresa or Jesus with dirt and spit. She stood up and walked to the gate and I stood up and walked to the gate and my phone vibrated in my pocket reminding me that I didn’t have flowers and of all my inadequacies. “Now boarding,” the male voice on the grainy PA said listing all the stops, none of which were pronounced as they appeared. Nothing in Boston is in plain English.

I stood behind her. North Station smelled of pizza and coffee. I can’t explain the feeling of looking at her freckled shoulders or the calmness instilled in me by her presence, but I absorbed it. I have learned in thirty-five years of life to absorb the good, soak it up, and deflect the bad but I am not, nor have I been successful at doing either. In fact, I have lived contrary to this philosophy as unsuccessfully as one could. I divorced a good wife, cheated with whores, been bankrupt twice, but finally in Andover I had it right. And with what little money I could squeeze out of my checking account I came to Boston to meet the girl who loved red roses, whom I met online several months before in the virtual world, though that front never seemed romantic to me. She came to me the few days before and we did little beyond what there was to do in a hotel room when its 100 degrees outside. She was perfect in every way but she was young and everything I said to her about love, life and liberty of the spirit (the way Otis must have once talked about American independence), about marriage and happiness, seemed to bead up on her skin and roll away in sweat or tears, dependent upon her current emotional tide. “I never knew love,” she confessed to me as we lied in the bed after the thing had been consummated. “Thank you for introducing me...”

“That isn’t love.”

“Are you saying you don’t love me?”

“No. I am saying that love is everything that follows. It is what happens when you’re not having sex. Sex is artificial sweetener. It isn’t sugar.” Everyone is a philosopher after orgasm. We floated there like survivors on a lifeboat.

“Well, I love it. When can you go again?”

“Ten minutes.”

....

The departure of the train was delayed ten minutes due to a fluid leak. I was still standing behind the girl who made me feel calm. She smelled of flesh and the faint scent of chamomile soap. Perhaps everything would be okay, her pulled back tuft of hair assured me. My girlfriend would forgive me of my sins as I had forgiven hers and all would be right again. The automated doors opened and reflexively a determined mob of people rushed into the station from the docked train. And without hearing instructions from the invisible PA man, I followed the girl down the long peninsula of concrete and fat stem-like pillars. She looked back at me suddenly. “Is this the train to Haverhill?”

“I don’t know. I am hoping it is the train to Andover. I am not from around here.”

“Well, Andover is a few stops before Haverhill,” she said confidently looking around as we boarded the train. We had walked the length of it for the open door that was all the way in the front. She talked normally, not the way many Bostonians do. An old man with a pronounced limp who creeped up on us assured her that this train had to go to Haverhill because he was heading to Wakefield, which was on the way, and he was already late and in danger of missing his tired wife who had to have chemotherapy in the morning. He was pulling a suitcase on wheels and sweating profusely like a man who might drop dead at any moment—the kind of man who AEDs were made for. She smiled beautifully at him and then at me as we walked up the empty rows of seats inside the vessel. It seemed like we were on a spaceship to me. I had never been on a train before unless I count the small ones that run through the mall at Christmastime. I waited for her to sit and I chose the seat across the aisle from her. The train began to fill up with people of all sorts but before it did I asked her, “Are you from Haverhill?” The second “h” is somehow silent.

“Yes,” she smiled. “I’m going home.” Before I had the chance to say another word to her, ask her something completely meaningful or utterly insignificant, to make talk the way people once did before they did so with their thumbs, a broken-down business type in khakis, a blue button-up shirt and a loosened tongue-red tie that seemingly bled from his neck and hung like an anchor, sat down between us in the seat next to me. He must have felt her peace as well, been drawn to her significance. She texted whoever it was she texted and I updated my girlfriend of every move and position with a refreshed ETA, as far as I knew it. My girlfriend, who confuses artificial sweetener hopelessly for love, who is still deliberating on my guilt or innocence in a matter that means little in a long life of truths and half-truths strung together for self-preservation for good cause—the self being previously defined. Oh, I loved her and little else could I think of, bar the distraction of a beautiful girl from Haverhill. I had seen beautiful women throughout my life and my stay in Boston, on the drive, in restaurants eating oysters, but no one had turned my head or twisted my neck or made me feel my own heart beating like a six foot drum. I slid my phone in my pocket and became a voyeur trying to observe the idiosyncrasies of other passengers, besides the girl with freckled shoulders, but they were faceless and insignificant. I tried to appreciate details of the train; the bright fluorescent lights that surprisingly didn’t flicker, the ladder-like luggage racks barely used, the fake wood-paneled walls spotted with bubblegum and sunspots, the single McDonald’s advertisement for sweet tea in a cheap broken frame, the blue and red vinyl seats, the way the car swayed like a cradle, smelled like licorice, the emergency exit which was a window, and the red floor that looked exactly like the surface of Mars, but she stole my attention and I was incapable of consuming anything else.

I leaned back to catch a glimpse of her when the man from Reading, he said, leaned forward playing on his phone. And I leaned forward when he leaned back to do the same. I used my black window which was an opportune mirror and caught glimpses of her looking at me and occasionally as the stops mounted and we drew closer to our inevitable separation, we made eye contact, traded smiles, and then looked away and back through windows where we could see nothing but the occasional headlights of wayward cars, streetlights, or business signs. We could have been looking across the universe for all we knew. My anxiety heightened as we stopped at Reading and the barge between us drifted to the exit. I was getting closer to Andover but I didn’t know if it was Andover that made me uneasy or the inexorable end. I slid to the aisle and she took her knees off the seat in front of her and waited perhaps for me to say something that welled inside of me, a thought, a feeling that never matured into words. Or perhaps it never degenerated into words as it never could be rightly spoken. My vibrating phone provided my excuse and I pulled it eagerly out of my pocket to ease my burden and it asked, “How much longer?”

“Ten minutes.” And for ten or so minutes I did nothing but sit there resigning myself to her judgment and I left the beautiful stranger alone though desperately I wanted to say “hello” or “thank you,” simply to hear her voice one more time. And when she said thank you for what, I could have said thank you for bandaging a deep wound that has bled for a decade. She may have asked how. And I would have replied simply, presence. There are those that are healers and those that are slayers and she is so clearly of the former class. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if she was a vegetarian and possessed a brilliant mind, a love of literature. We loved all the same books, the same movies, and she was as into dogs and dreams of Ireland and cabins in the woods as me. She surely would love Picasso and Tchaikovsky and The Beatles. She loves small cars, draft beer, history and card games. But maybe she had a boyfriend, I excused. Maybe I was delusional and imagining looks that were never exchanged, imaginary smiles, unduly adding meaning to accidental eye contact, and mistaking politeness for something more meaningful, some possibility of perfection that was a mirage. Doubt is often the slayer of happiness. But how silly of me to throw such weight around when I had paid no price, made no sacrifice, while a girl in Andover waits in a car to confer upon me final sentence and a decision to go forth or to fold. I could spend an hour with her then I would have to catch the last train back to Boston...

“Andover next,” the attendant called. She was an older Hispanic woman with a peculiarly deep voice, but she was pretty and her hair was pulled up and pinned under a dark blue conductor’s hat with a brass emblem on front that looked important. I imagined her children thought she had the coolest job in the universe. She opened the door and the exit sign glared at me. I stood up and looked over at the girl from Haverhill and smiled. The smile was bold but nothing else followed suit.

“Have a safe trip,” I said so inadequately.

“You too,” she replied perfectly. And with it our brief happening was severed coldly by time which I am learning is the cruelest of all three marks—birth and death, the bookends. It is languid when it should be swift and is never munificent when desired. I headed to the front of the train much too soon in my desertion of hope. Yet again I let myself fail to absorb goodness and I was like some imprudent insect stumbling further into a web to be devoured by my poor decisions. The train’s stop was laborious. The attendant had trouble getting the door open and I fidgeted standing in line that amassed behind me like a pileup on the freeway. I looked back and smiled again and on a blue vinyl seat, before plastic wood-paneled walls, on the surface of Mars, and under steady fluorescent lights that seemed liked they belonged in an operating room, sat the girl whose significance I would perhaps never know. She was looking straight at me and offered me a sympathetic smile. The train stopped, the door finally opened, and I walked out swallowed by the warm night and greeted by every cricket in Andover. I looked up from the side of the train and she looked down.

My girlfriend was in her idling car and smiled as I tried to open the door which she kept locked for a moment until I gave up on trying to open it. She forgave me for the lie and asked what I was thinking about after a long silence. We had no time to make love. She turned on the radio and played our song which was a sweet gesture, analogous to a last meal provided to the condemned, or a cigarette in the mouth of the blindfolded man waiting for bullets from a firing squad.

What was I thinking?

“Haverhill,” I said. “I’m pretty sure that her favorite flowers aren’t red roses.”

“Who?” she asked, but I let it linger as I drifted away. I thought of everything suddenly, my head was flooded and my soul was shipwrecked in that parking lot, and she was no longer a fellow survivor but rather the current that pushed me away—or some monster that materialized beneath the black waves that devours and purges me for her pleasure. I looked at the trees in the lot and the lights, the console of her car, the dashboard softly aglow on her beautiful face and chest, her seat was reclined as it once had been when she chose not me but him—a him as insignificant as the insect that bounced off the windshield. She was devoid of expression, as emotionless as the moon and I was unable to speak yet again, momentous words to do me favor or to simply be remembered by. I could only imagine her and him twisted up in that car illuminated by security lights, windows steamed. I left abruptly, pulled out my return ticket and waited on a bench in the balance of time for the train to return from Haverhill.

I would never see either girl again, I imagined. There is either possibility but who knows in what form or condition. I thought of saving some money and returning to Boston to ride that train back and forth to Haverhill but I know I probably won’t. But I will no longer fill my life with artificial sweeteners, nor will I let myself be judged by someone else, nor beg anyone for their pardon. Nor will I let my thumbs talk for me for the apparatus that impaired me lies in the Charles River along with the British dead. I will forever believe in lightning bolts, for better or worse, and the possibility of a girl from Haverhill who I was not in love with but who reminded me that there is always a door number two and possibilities outside of impossibilities. And in the Garden as I strolled through to return to my hotel for a final night in Boston, Neil Diamond sang “Cracklin’ Rosie.”