The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

‘No doubt,’ Brenda says. ‘And a bottle of Orange Driver for me. But I won’t drink while I’m behind the wheel, Jaz. I have to keep my license. It’s about all I got left.’

‘Can you really get any money out of your folks, do you think?’

Brenda tells herself that once they see the kids – assuming the kids can be bribed (or intimidated) into good behavior – she can. ‘But not a word about the lottery,’ she says.

‘No way,’ Jasmine says. ‘I was born at night but it wasn’t last night.’

They yuk at this one, an oldie but a goodie.

‘So what do you think?’

‘I’ll have to take Eddie and Rose Ellen out of school …’

‘BFD,’ Brenda says. ‘So what do you think, girl?’

After a long pause on the other end, Jasmine says, ‘Road trip!’

‘Road trip!’ Brenda hollers back.

Then they are chanting it while the three kids bawl in Brenda’s Sanford apartment and at least one (maybe two) are bawling in Jasmine’s North Berwick apartment. These are the fat women nobody wants to see when they’re on the streets, the ones no guy wants to pick up in the bars unless the hour is late and the mood is drunk and there’s nobody better in sight. What men think when they’re drunk – Brenda and Jasmine both know this – is that thunder thighs are better than no thighs at all. Especially at closing time. They went to high school together in Mars Hill and now they’re downstate and they help each other when they can. They are the fat women nobody wants to see, they have a litter of children between them, and they are chanting road trip, road trip like a couple of cheerleading fools.

On a September morning, already hot at eight thirty, this is the way things happen. It’s never been any different.

II.

SO THESE TWO OLD POETS WHO WERE ONCE LOVERS IN PARIS HAVE A PICNIC NEAR THE BATHROOMS.

Phil Henreid is seventy-eight now, and Pauline Enslin is seventy-five. They’re both skinny. They both wear spectacles. Their hair, white and thin, blows in the breeze. They’ve paused at a rest area on 1–95 near Fairfield, which is about twenty miles north of Augusta. The rest area building is barnboard, and the adjacent bathrooms are brick. They’re good-looking bathrooms. State-of-the-art bathrooms, one could say. There’s no odor. Phil, who lives in Maine and knows this rest area well, would never have proposed a picnic here two months earlier. In the summertime, the traffic on the interstate swells with out-of-state vacationers, and the Turnpike Authority brings in a line of plastic Port-O-Sans. They make this pleasant grassy area stink like hell on New Year’s Eve. But now the Port-O-Sans are in storage somewhere and the rest area is nice.

Pauline puts a checked cloth on the initial-scarred picnic table standing in the shade of an old oak, and anchors it with a wicker picnic basket against a slight warm breeze. From the basket she takes sandwiches, potato salad, melon wedges, and two slices of coconut-custard pie. She also has a large glass bottle of red tea. Ice cubes clink cheerfully inside.

‘If we were in Paris, we’d have wine,’ Phil says.

‘In Paris we never had another eighty miles to drive on the turnpike,’ she replies. ‘That tea is cold and it’s fresh. You’ll have to make do.’

‘I wasn’t carping,’ he says, and lays an arthritis-swollen hand over hers (which is also swollen, although marginally less so). ‘This is a feast, my dear.’

They smile into each other’s used faces. Although Phil has been married three times (and has scattered five children behind him) and Pauline has been married twice (no children, but lovers of both sexes in the dozens), they still have quite a lot between them. Much more than a spark. Phil is both surprised and not surprised. At his age – late, but not quite last call – you take what you can and are happy to get it. They are on their way to a poetry festival at the University of Maine’s Orono branch, and while the compensation for their joint appearance isn’t huge, it’s adequate. Since he has an expense account, Phil has splurged and rented a Cadillac from Hertz at the Portland Jetport, where he met her plane. Pauline jeered at the Caddy, said she always knew he was a plastic hippie, but she did so gently. He wasn’t a hippie, but he was a genuine iconoclast, a one-of-a-kinder, and she knows it. As he knows that her osteoporotic bones have enjoyed the ride.