Brenda Brood

Quiet Desperation

The whirl of sound and movement outside Brenda was synchronous with the thoughts that somersaulted in her head. They were not so much thoughts as impressions. The impression of the hot ceramic mug on her palm, steamed by the rising vapors of the buzzing espresso machine; the impression on the wet floor over which she sometimes glided as if she stretched to hold open a closing door with her foot; the impression left by the last customer, a surly yet benevolent old gentleman who had already been drinking at that early hour; the impression of the younger man who came in ten minutes before him and ordered an Earl Grey then glanced at her several times--his eyes still lingered on her hips; the impression that Steven was still upset with her for grinding two pounds of beans on drip that were meant for French press. All of those impressions, like the imprint of her fingers on the glass pastry-case, were at first vivid and clear, but very shortly became smudged and faded as new events nudged them into oblivion.
The lulls in activity were held hostage by a million little things. A jug of skimmed milk that was almost empty, or a table that had not been cleared for a while, or some other chore too small to break away from whatever she was doing to attend to, all of these things were present in her mind and they hovered somewhere between inconsequential and imperative. It was not hot enough in the cafe for her to sweat very much, but along the waistband of her required black slacks Brenda's delicate skin chafed and gasped for air.  Her physical discomfort was only another impression that careened carelessly along with the rest, assuming various levels of importance at unpredictable moments.
At three O'clock in the afternoon, the stream of customers piddled down to a small puddle of regulars.   They blocked the cash register and spoke in loud voices to one another stopping only to wet their lips between each clever chaff at a comrade or at “people” en masse. Steven, being the manager of the cafe, made himself comfortable on a round stool with a high wooden back as he attempted to infiltrate their conversations.
“I don't think I could even express the satisfaction I feel when I get to say 'no' to some bum asking for change.” Steven confessed the moment when the conversation reached a natural halt.
“Um,” Uriel, a man of either thirty or fifty answered after a short pause, glancing at the four other men in succession. “It's like hanging up on a telemarketer. It's really exerting all the power you have.” There was a approving general laugh which was peppered with short dry coughs.
As a young man who was eager to make a name for himself, Steven was delighted when older semi-professional men showed him any attention at all. The little piece of heartlessness he contributed to the conversation was soon brushed aside by Peter Longweller who observed the overall imbecility of the local voters who recently ensured the city's conservative mayor another four years in office.
Meanwhile, Brenda had slipped out of the back door and lit a cigarette. All of the tension from the morning rush fizzled out of her and the impressions which had been so tenacious, flitted away leaving only the awareness that she had been worn down by something unpleasant. The first drag of her cigarette was euphoric, but each successive inhalation made her more aware of just how unhappy she felt about her life.
She had just turned twenty, an important milestone for her as she regarded it as the end of her youth. Brenda had never deluded herself with fantastic notions of fame or eternal freedom from cares, but she was not fully prepared (and indeed, who is?) for the type of life that came with living beyond her teenage years. Another day arriving brought with it all of her diurnal habits, so regular that she experienced neither happiness nor hope for something better. It was the loss of hope that she felt most keenly. There were no homecoming dances, school trips abroad or graduation parties to look forward to, no visions of a future where she truly uses all of her pent up potential. There was only the day as it stood before her, vacant and without instruction or demands.  Each moment an empty vessel which she was to, somehow, fill.
As she stood in the alley-way, watching the pedestrians passing on the cross street, she lamented the ignorance of her childhood. Had she known that high-school graduation would actually come, that her friends really would all be going off to college, that her father who before had always been so tender and playful, would start looking at her as if she had thrown away a most precious gift, had she known that these things were not abstract musings on a possible, yet still-too-distant future, but that they would come make up her entire life, perhaps she would have done things differently.
What she could have actually done differently, Brenda was unable to say. She was a decent student, never excelling enough to distinguish herself nor slacking off enough to get her into trouble. She was not frivolous or self-absorbed. Anyone who knew her found her friendly, open-minded and willing to share whatever she had. And she did give generously, but never gratuitously.  Brenda recognized that even things like generosity and goodness have their acceptable limits.
Brenda was not particularly brooding over her past happiness or her present dashed hopes as she sat in the alley and watched her cigarette slowly burn down.  She spent her time watching pedestrians pass by and thought how nice it would be to be among them while there were still two hours left in her shift.
She did, however, think, or rather feel the impression of the pressure that her father had recently placed on her to return to school and get a degree. Brenda's father never went to college, in fact, he never saw the other side of eighth grade, going out to work when many of his friends were learning about economics by trading baseball cards. He had learned to appreciate higher learning by living a difficult life in which academia was completely absent. For Brenda to hear her father talk so insistently about her return to school gave her the impression that he was being hypocritical, and as he turned out relatively well-off, working in a paper mill as a foreman, why shouldn't she if she followed a similar path? If he could only understand her, if he could only stand in her shoes for a moment, if he could only--but the cigarette had burned down to the filter and burnt her finger. She tossed away the butt and went back to work.
Steven had only been the manager of Café Bovary for two months, before that time he had scoured for post-college prospects from the comfort of his mother's furnished basement. He had disappointed his mother by not tackling Wall Street directly after his graduation from the University of Arizona. Steven shared in his mother's hopes for a short time after getting his BS in business management and finance, but he was soon disabused of the notions that the business world would be fighting over obtaining his youthful insight and ingenuous enthusiasm.
His mother had invested high hopes in her son, not even partially aware that his disposition was usually repellent to people and that his low cheekbones and lanky arms, which his mother had thought to be the pride of their ancestors, came off to most as a sign of poor breeding. But, if Steven was anything he was enthusiastic about making his way in the world and it would take much more than long arms and a long face to stop him.
Even while free of those concerns, Steven never had a lack of things to peeve him. The world often appeared deluded by the idea that wealth and power were not the keys to success and happiness. So many people lacked the drive and ambition that he saw in himself, and all of them seemed to exist as stumbling blocks on his way to the top, or as sightless creatures groping in darkness, hoping to happen upon the tools for a successful future. That Brenda could come into work fifteen minutes late, grind two bags of beans on the wrong setting, and then, to top it all, sneak away for a break without saying a word to him, leaving him alone at the counter to make no less than three lattes without anyone working the register--that was completely reckless in his eyes. He understood that she was much younger than he was (he was twenty-three), but her work ethic was so flyblown that her youth did not allow significant excuse for her behavior.
When Brenda came back in from the kitchen and slipped past him, averting her eyes and smelling of light-tar cigarettes, Steven's attempts to draw her attention to her errors by hemming and hawing at the espresso machine went unheeded and unnoticed. Brenda proceeded to stock the mug rack slowly, with less effort to complete the task and more to avoid having any discourse with her manager.
Two fashionable young women approached the counter and began examining the menu on the chalkboard which hung on the wall behind the counter. Brenda was quick to pull herself away from the mug rack to take their order, but Steven was quicker, intent on showing his underling an example of an ideal employee. His smile was wide and he clicked his large white teeth quickly before saying in a carefully articulated voice, “Good afternoon ladies, have you decided what you would like?” The two ladies shuffled their feet and peeked into their bags, and amid prodigious streams of “um”s and “ah”s, managed to order two cappuccinos.
Hearing the orders, Brenda began steaming the milk and pulling the espressos.  She was not far into the process before Steven nudged her aside and, under his breath, ordered her in the back to begin washing dishes. Brenda relinquished her job to him without protest, glad at least that a swinging kitchen door would separate them for a while.
The stainless steel industrial sink heated up like a ceramic kiln as the scalding water rushed into the basin. Placing a stack of plastic plates in the sink, Brenda plunged her small, white hand into the water and recoiled from it instantly. She moaned as the falling plates splashed the near boiling liquid into her eyes and all over the front of her apron. She hurled a wad of steel wool into the water and let out a pathetic, nearly desperate cry and leaned against the salad station with her face in her hands.
Her frustration and disappointment was like a void in her head. It was a vast and limitless emptiness devoid of a specific disdainful object towards which she could direct her anger. Short sobs welled from her stomach and came to her throat like hiccups. As if catching a glimpse of a final vestige of light inside the darkness of her thoughts, she eagerly glanced at the clock on the microwave, and with an unintentional sigh saw that it was only twenty-five minutes past three. She resumed her former position of abject helplessness, half hoping that Steven would come into the kitchen so that he could serve her as a receptacle for all of the shapeless angst brewing in her young heart.
It was in this position that Eleanor found Brenda, several minutes after her lonely paroxysm. She seemed to crash through the swinging kitchen door, yelling a loud and jocular salutation to some invisible person standing in the cafe. Eleanor was big and colorful, in personality as well as in body. Both of her arms, from wrist to collar, were covered with bright pastel tattoos. There were mermaids floating within an ocean of seahorses, and fire consuming a slight young woman who could have been Joan of Arc, there were swirls of colors which could have been music, melancholic at times and rambunctious at others. All of the images converged at the center of her chest in the image of an oyster shell opened just wide enough to see the two mysterious eyes of Venus rising. In the summertime, Eleanor exclusively wore tank-tops, which not only proudly revealed every curve of her large breasts, but every inch of the fantasy world painted onto her skin.
If Eleanor had not noticed the look of distress in Brenda's face she could not have acted more oblivious. She tossed her bag, which was made entirely of Tibetan beads, onto the salad station making a loud clunk, and took a ball of fresh mozzarella out of the cooler then took a bite.
“How was it today?” she asked after swallowing half of her mouthful of cheese.
Brenda shrugged her shoulders and began rinsing the plates that she had left in the sink. She was not particularly fond of her co-worker and generally avoided making conversation with her. Eleanor was too loud, too boisterous, too confident for Brenda to feel at ease around.
Eleanor finished her cheese and started grinding coffee for the night shift, every now and again shouting a line of a song that seemed to be circulating in her head. Each time she struck up a tune, Eleanor would look at Brenda, who stood with her back to her washing dishes, to see if her good mood was somehow rubbing off on her. After three or four trials without effect she walked over to her and put her hand on her shoulder. Brenda turned her large, dark eyes to Eleanor as she suddenly began:
“Lucy in the sky with di-a-monds!”
Brenda laughed.
“Lucy in the sky with DIAMONDS!” Eleanor began dancing in the kitchen, waving a rubber spatula in the air, singing as much of the tune as she could remember falling back into the chorus each time she forgot a verse. Brenda watched her and felt amused, yet slightly ashamed of being so cold towards her. Really, she could not understand the woman parading through the kitchen as if she were a member of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Eleanor was twenty-seven years old, an age so strange to Brenda that she could not even imagine herself there, she worked part-time at the coffee shop, she was single, unambitious yet devoted to living life as if she were holding it upside-down by its legs and shaking every last penny from its pockets.
Eleanor's profile was a sharp one.  Her nose was straight, almost beak-like, yet her cheeks were healthy and rouged with a color somewhere between purple and cream. She rushed to Brenda's side while finishing one final chorus and she could plainly see the defined and cruel shape of her thin, red lips and again Brenda recalled why she could never be at ease in Eleanor's presence. The cruel lips bent into a smile and Eleanor gave her co-worker a friendly tap on the back as if saying: “No matter how bad you feel, you can always enjoy me.”
Steven had not even bothered to enter the kitchen when he poked his head through the door and shouted, “There's customers out here, keep it down. And if the concert's over I could use one of you at the espresso machine.”
“Yes sir, boss-man” Eleanor replied with a rather proper salute. Steven frowned and pulled his head from the doorway.
“Hey, what are you doing tonight?” Eleanor asked, nearly shutting her eyes as she stopped at the kitchen door.
“I don't know.” Brenda looked up Eleanor's arms and followed a school of clownfish to a spilling martini glass.
“There's a show at The Royal tonight, and if you'd like. I'll be doing chains and it's a good time. You should come.” Eleanor closed her eyes completely and tilted her head back and to the left as she spoke the last words. Brenda had some misgivings about what “chains” Eleanor would be doing and how it could possibly be fun for her, but she nodded and was about to thank her for the invitation when Eleanor began bantering with a new customer through the open kitchen door.
Directly after Eleanor left, Steven, feeling more inclined to enter the kitchen, approached Brenda with a scowl he had made no attempts to mask. “You can go home now.” His voice was curt, not authoritative, just harsh. “I'll wait for Ben to come in and you've done enough for one day.” He had not intended to be so hard on her, but he was.
Brenda took off her apron, washed her hands and left the cafe without a word of protest or the semblance of a questioning glance.
Once on the streets, she mixed within the streaming pedestrian traffic which only a half hour before she had longed to walk among, but now as she traveled with them as if pulled by a tide, there was no harmony and no leisure, she became just another desperate face in a desperate crowd.

   Joyless Laughter


When Steven said that he would wait for assistant manager Ben to come in at four-thirty, he could have said with the same degree of honesty that he would wait until ten minutes before the last bus of the day came to take him home. Which is exactly what he did.
The night-time regulars began filing in at around six-thirty, leaving their wives and families, if they had them, to spend their entire evening in the yellow glow of the hanging lamps and glossy tabletops. After sunset, the Café Bovary changed into a sort of dry social club. It no longer existed as a business to produce profit, but as a den for late middle-aged squatters, sitting squarely and solidly amid the ebb and flow of slender teenagers and the occasional homeless person.
At one table four regulars made up a game of bridge, near them Victoria with the two lazy eyes and in as much spandex and lace as she could fit around her hills and valleys of rolling flesh, watched for familiar faces as she collected cigarettes and enumerated the items on her ever-lengthening list of antipsychotic medications for any semi-interested ear. Claude, a fifty-year-old French emigrant who smoked clove cigarettes in the corner with two cautious and curious young people, was not wearing his potato-sack dress that day as it was Thursday and that rather spare garment was reserved exclusively for weekends and French holidays. Rather removed from the group, Doug, an artist from South Carolina who has privately painted the portrait of every young male regular brave enough to let him, stood by a new display of prints in blue overalls with a head full of bright silver hair. Somehow, that room full of individuals, as eclectic and eccentric in their own rights, comprised a fluent and natural whole in the Cafe Bovary, so much so that neither their uniqueness nor their unity suffered in the process of cohabitation.
Steven made a fourth in bridge after overcoming his aversion to sitting near Victoria.  Her ever-lengthening list of medications grew as fast as her ever-increasing tab. The owner felt pity for her, he knew that, but his heart had no room for pity as far as money was concerned and he had repeatedly refused to serve her on credit. But, as often occurred in his weak bridge game, he was repeatedly trumped by Victoria's invocation of the boss's name. Now, he sat with his back to her as she looked over his shoulders at his hand and breathed heavily on his neck.
“Do you mind?” Steven snapped at her and concealed his hand from the lazy and translucent eyes leering over his shoulders.
Victoria did not seem to mind anything. With a deadpan stare, she looked right through Steven then lighted a long white cigarette.
“Victoria,” Uriel shouted, sitting opposite to Steven, holding a rather poor hand.  “Have you been to the doctor's office lately?” He winked at Peter Longweller sitting beside him. Peter quietly laughed under his thick graying mustache and with his foot nudged Orson The Hamster, who was so absorbed in recalling the tactics of the game that he was about to miss the diverting banter that was to ensue. Steven slumped deeper into his chair, stewing over his hand as if it were some letter of rejection.
“They took away my Prozac,” Victoria began as she stood from her seat and toddled over to stand behind Uriel. Uriel slid his chair near to the table to avoid having his backside meeting with Victoria's protrusive paunch. “My doctor said I was su'pose to take it everyday, but my father's insurance won't pay for it. Peter, will you roll me a cigarette?” She noticed Peter Longweller taking out a leather pouch filled with cheap tobacco. Very reluctantly, Peter removed an extra paper at her request and taking out the merest pinch of tobacco began rolling her a cigarette.
Being the manager, Steven felt that it was his duty to speak up against such blatant panhandling in his establishment. “Victoria, don't bother customers with asking for things. God knows you owe enough as it is.” He did not look at her as he spoke, but from the short silence that followed he knew that his words had an effect.
“I've known Peter for twenty-five years.” Victoria eventually answered in a long, drawn and entirely emotionless tone, “that's before you were born, and...he doesn't mind, neither does Eric,” that was the owner's name, “so why should you?”
The dead stare that landed on him along with the reference to his youth, which always induced a sense of inferiority in his heart, was too much for Steven to take. “Because,” Steven began, hotter than he had intended to show, “I run this place now and I can't leave flagrant mooching unchecked. I have a responsibility, an obligation to...to ensure the...” He began to mutter, looking almost appealingly to the others for help. They merely sat with smug amusement, seemingly pleased by the way things were turning out, “...the integrity of the cafe...and you...ah, let’s just go on with the game.” He returned to his former position, slouching in his seat and brooding over his rather strong hand.
Victoria turned her attention away from Steven in the same manner one might turn away from a market orator giving a sales pitch for something that the listener had never the slightest intention of buying. She nudged Uriel with her paunch. “The doctor wrote out a prescription for Xanax, 'cause it's cheaper, but I can't smoke on Xanax. Thank you, Peter.” She put the tiny cigarette in her mouth and lit it immediately.
Uriel began to regret beginning a conversation with the woman and replied, hardly looking up from his cards he answered, “You don't say.”
“People don't need to smoke,” The Hamster observed, quite suddenly. He was called “the Hamster” in the cafe for his stark blond whiskers and his tendency to go round and round in conversation without ever going anywhere. “If you choose to smoke, you can't blame your doctor, because people choose to smoke, and it's no fault of his, is it?  And it’s not up to the doctor to see that you smoke, probably the opposite, I’d say.  There’s no blaming the medicine for your personal habits, the things that you chose to do, you know, are your own choice, I mean...” He could have gone on for much longer, but Victoria interrupted.
“Yeah, you're right.” She looked briefly out of the window, then back to the table. “I never learned how to play bridge. I bet it's hard.” She laughed loudly and with a wide open mouth. There was no joy or humor in her laughter. It could have been confused with a lengthy cough or a succession of hiccups if one was to go by the tone alone.
The sound made Steven shiver, but the feeling was completely internalized and no impression of it rose to the surface. After a few hands, Steven excused himself from the table saying there was something he needed to attend to in the kitchen.
Turning behind the counter, Steven walked directly to the espresso machine where Eleanor stood steaming a pot of milk. The hissing of the steam grew and subsided as she moved the steaming wand about in the pot. “You're still here?” Eleanor spoke loudly and easily over the fizzle of the near boiling milk.
Steven gave a courtesy look into the pot and around the cafe, as if he had been suspecting something amiss in that corner of the room, but could not find it yet. “Yes, but I am leaving soon.”
Eleanor smiled and nodded, suddenly switching off the steam, making a silent hole in the hitherto tumultuous atmosphere. “You've got to catch that bus,” Eleanor said, only because she felt that there was so little to say to him.
Looking over the exotic woman, Steven felt what he had often felt when he stood with her alone. It was a strange sense of longing, an itch that not only couldn't be scratched, but could not be located as it lingered at a particular point as well as everywhere in his body. In his mind, he ran his fingers up her arms, his hands meeting at the smiling oyster shell and its two mysterious eyes that seemed to invite him inside.
He had been standing before her for some minutes with the weak personal excuse of overseeing her drink-making. When she had finished he casually asked, “Where's Ben?” and she nodded at the kitchen door while servicing the next in line.
The first sensation that Steven experienced upon entering the kitchen was the sound of Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. He did not recognize the tune, nor was he much of a music fan, but the sound of a dozen moaning violins being led into chaos by a single misanthropic bow made him feel ill at ease, and before doing anything else he turned down the volume so that the sane and the mad noises became indistinguishable from each other. At the sudden reduction in volume, Ben looked up from the cutting board where he was shredding a head of lettuce, consciously in time with the music.
“Oh, you're still here?” Ben asked as he resumed his work. He was an attractive young man, around Steven's age, with a passion for poetry and art that rivaled Steven's passion for money and authority. His hair was dyed pitch black which darkened his eyes and brow in a way (and Ben was well aware) that gave him a Byronic look. His face was perpetually dabbled by a five O'clock shadow which provoked many who knew him to wonder if Ben's face could somehow avoid every other hour of the day.
“Yeah, but I am leaving soon,” Steven answered.
Ben looked at the manager for a few weighted moments, his thick black eyebrows raised slightly and his chin lifted as if about to swallow a small pill without water. “I see,” he said finally and turned his attention back to the lettuce.
Steven wandered around the kitchen, checking the levels of the mayonnaise, of the cheese, investigating a leaking drain that he had patched the day before, remarking the width of the lettuce that Ben had shredded, along with several other pointless things before even Steven saw that he was only attempting to look occupied and was doing a bad job of it. Really, Steven should have left four hours ago. He had no business being there any longer, manager or not, and after a few minutes of meaningless labor in the kitchen he wondered whether he loved the place he was or loathed the place where he was to go.
The clock on the microwave read 8:25, and he could wait no longer if he was to catch the last bus home. After giving a few bland instructions to for the next day prep-work, during which the young poet watched Steven's mouth with his customary raised brows and lifted chin, he quickly said goodbye (to which Ben replied “farewell”), and then went to the espresso machine to assure himself that everything was as it should be. Eleanor stood before the humming machine with both hands on her hips. The sharp and defined curve of her lips along with her proud stance and the color that emanated from her made Steven think of a Norse goddess, or was it a gatekeeper, her breasts two hounds with menacing sneers?
Steven averted his eyes from her as he said “good-night.” He thought he heard her chuckle in a way that sounded almost triumphant, but he did not look at her again.
Claude, rubbing his thick white stubble in the most thoughtful manner, had replaced Steven as a fourth in bridge and as he passed the players and bid them a final adieu he cast a short reproachful glare at Victoria, who rolled in her chair and watched absolutely nothing happening on the ceiling with the most profound interest.
Although Steven never enjoyed using public transportation, the smells and sights always made him think of a portable sewer, that night he did more thinking than observing which made him enjoy the ride far less. What stung him most was what he would call “loss of face,” not that he considered himself to wear a “face” other than his true and genuine (rather long) one, but it was the experience of being seen as not in complete control of everything around him. That he could crumble so completely before Victoria, whose wits, if measured in yards, wouldn't breach the length of a horse pill, that his underlings could treat him in such a familiar manner, and he without having the gusto to put them in their proper place, that he could feel such uninvited feelings in close quarters with Eleanor, it made him doubt his station in life and plunged him into despondency.
It was the vision of Eleanor which plunged him most deep into that mire. The first time he met her he was shocked that a person could so ostracize herself from the business world by covering her body in tattoos; that she could condemn herself to a life of coffee shops, bars, and basement rock bands for the sake of seeming colorful or to “express herself” was, without much exaggeration, horrifying to him. It was this abhorrence that made him watch her more closely, as if to study a mysterious and dangerous creature. After a while he found himself watching her without even the awareness that he was doing so, or she would catch him looking and he would, as if guilty of an impropriety, turn his head quickly away. Curiosity mutated into compulsion, compulsion to obsession, until her image not only plagued his days at work, but his nights in bed.
As he neared his mother's house his thoughts slowly began meandering towards what awaited him there.
When he entered the small ranch style home, he immediately heard the familiar sound of the Nightly News blaring in the living room. Steven's mother had just turned forty-five when she discovered that she was pregnant with Steven. She, as well as his late father, considered him a “miracle child” coming to their patch at that late stage in life after nearly twenty years of failed conceptions. Gertrude, Steven's mother, was a religiously devoted woman who not only believed in divine intervention, but in the divine providence of her son's miraculous life. She believed this so strongly that no physical evidence to the contrary could make her falter and no personal observation of her own could lead her to think that her son was not destined for greatness.
She was then in her sixty-eighth year and had begun to go slightly deaf, and therefore the talking head on her small television screen seemed to shout the world news as if an enemy was nearing our shores. Of course, Steven could have slipped past his mother and into his basement apartment without her knowledge, which he was inclined to do in his downtrodden state of mind, but he was a dutiful son who returned his mother's profound confidence with forced filial respect.
“Oh, Stevie” Gertrude exclaimed as he approached and kissed her, “God save you, how well you look. Did you have a nice day?”
“Yes mother,” he shouted near her ear, sliding his hand from hers. “How was your day?”
Gertrude made a face that exiled her own existence to the realm of things inconsequential and answered, “Oh, you know I'm an old woman. Sit, Stevie, sit.”
Steven sat on the chair opposite her and looked at the television. “I see the Dow is down again,” he remarked offhandedly. Gertrude knew that her son had spoken, for she had not taken her old, faithful eyes off of him since he entered the room, but his words somehow got lost on their way to her ears. “Stocks!” Steven shouted, “Down!”
“Oh yes Steven. It's dreadful, dreadful,” she answered, presuming that her son referred to the helicopter that was shot down that day over Somalia.
He sat with her for a few minutes when she suddenly spoke, “Oh, I've forgotten. Your cousin Drew is here. I told him he could wait in your room if he'd like. He should still be there.” Gertrude looked at the clock and the calendar to be certain that the arrival of her nephew hadn't occurred sometime in the morning, or on some other day of the week.
Very little news could have been as unwelcome as this, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average would have to have gone so much lower to even compare and a fleet of exploded helicopters wouldn't even touch it. Steven wondered why the last person he wished to see is often the one who is most likely to knock on his door. His cousin Drew Parrot was a twenty-eight-year-old used car salesman who had an over-abundance of the attributes most commonly affixed to the profession, yet still managed to be exceedingly inept at it. He was loud, pushy, and self-centered to the degree that he had nurtured the art of feigning interest in other people so well that most who met him hardly noticed. He was also a terrible alcoholic and whenever he showed up at Steven's house, there was little doubt he was low on cash and hoped to persuade Steven to go out drinking with him.
Instead of putting off the inevitable, Steven immediately left his mother with a kiss and entered his basement apartment.
“Steve-o!” Drew, dressed ready for the clubs, stood to his feet and opened his arms wide. “We're going out tonight, right? Why haven't you answered my calls? I forgive you. Just a drink or two, I promise. It's lady's night at The Rialto. When was the last time you got laid? I swear I'll get you laid tonight, it's lady's night, which means it's your night buddy, ha ha! Hey, how can Drew help You? That's what I'm all about! Come on get dressed!”
Steven could fight, but it would be to no avail, and besides most of his strength was gone. He entered his closet with a deep sigh and he sifted through the rack of shirts. As he did so, he inwardly wished that he had been given the opportunity to sift through possible lives as he waited to be born for he felt certain he would have found one that fit him better than the one he had.

A Rebellion Against Non-Rebellion


Brenda's parents lived in a quiet, rather drowsy area of the suburbs. From the café, it took her two buses and a half-mile walk to reach their front-door. Brenda alighted from the second bus and looked upon the endless stretch of blue and gray porches and shingled roofs, each house differentiating itself from the next only by the brass house numbers on the third pillar and a variety of different sorts of mail-boxes which served the occupants as the sole image of individuality. Making her way down the lifeless street, Brenda wondered whether her neighbors truly were individuals at all or if the principal differences from one to another was no more than a particular preference for a certain type of mailbox.
Did Brenda rebel against the uniformity of her calm suburban corner? When she was young, at the age when the most obvious observations about society were the most profound, she treated her isolated and sheltered life with vocal disdain. She dyed her hair red and green, wore baggy clothes in which two or three of her could easily fit, and wore a studded nose ring as a physical expression of defiance. The society of friends she sought out all adorned similar dresses and ornaments of individuality and they banded together as one against the conformity of society at large. They rode skateboards and stopped washing their hair, listened to music that was loud, fast and disharmonious, and trusted no one over thirty.
Much to Brenda's chagrin, her parents did not threaten her with expulsion from their home, or tell her that her friends were bad influences who would inevitably lead her down the path towards teenage pregnancy and heroin addiction. In fact, her mom and dad seemed to look at her rebelliousness in a way that made Brenda think that they had expected it, or worse, were pleased by it. She could not comprehend that her suburban parents could be so easy-going about her spontaneous act of revolt against their comfortable and complacent society, that it could fail to shock them. All of the music that she listened to told her again and again that authority figures love nothing more than to impose conformity on young people to keep them in line with the traditional family, the government and the church. Something was not adding up.
When her friends stopped dyeing their hair red and green and started dying it blonde with highlights, removed their nose rings, and wore clothes that drew attention to their developing bodies, Brenda held fast to the muddle of her “anti” principles and finally gained her sought-after reputation as an outsider among her friends. Contrary to what she had expected, her friends did not shun her, pick on her, or abandon her when she refused to conform, nor did they adulate her for her steadiness of principle. They simply turned their attention to other parts of their lives and accepted that Brenda could do anything that she chose without impacting them in the least. If she wished to carry on rebelling against something that had never oppressed her, what was it to them?
The first time that she ever truly and deeply shocked them, both her friends and her parents, was in her senior year of high-school when she proclaimed that she had no intention of furthering her education in the university. Brenda loved the look of incredulous amazement on the faces of her friends when she explained it to them.
“I don't want to be churned out of the 'good citizen' factory and turned into another drone bee for a society that I disagree with.” She had prepared this explanation long in advance and repeated it with a solemnity usually associated with great and pivotal events.
“Think about it,” Brenda would continue, reveling in her own independent thinking. “It is our responsibility as children of the bourgeoisie to end the cycle of capitalism that breaks the common-worker on its wheel. By entering a university I am endorsing that cycle of abuse, and aligning myself to the course of self-serving and mindless obedience to the system that reared me.”
Her friends knew not what to think. It was one thing to enjoy the privilege of teenage dissent by flouting independence in the face of their teachers and parents, but quite another to sabotage one's own life in the defense of those cloudy and dubious principles. But Brenda had committed herself to the idea and would not be budged.
The look on her parents' faces was less enjoyable.
It was a Sunday and her father was in the garage carving a small wooden rocking-horse when Brenda asked him if he could come into the kitchen to talk. He put down his tools with an expression of curiosity and followed his daughter to the kitchen-table where his wife stood, her arms crossed on a heavily pregnant belly. He gave his wife a questioning look as he sat on one end of the table and Brenda sat at the other. Brenda's mother shook her head in answer to his look in a way that implied that she did not know what was happening, but she was certain that it was not good news. Brenda's then eight-year-brother Stanley ran through the kitchen dragging a T.V. antenna in his wake and Brenda looked at him disdainfully then at her mother's pregnant belly where the .5 child was peacefully incubating.
“Well,” her father began, showing both palms of his strong and calloused hands, “what's up?”
Brenda spoke immediately and without preface. “Mom and dad, I have decided not to go to college.” She folded her hands and mentally fortified herself.
Wife looked at husband, slowly hung his head and looked at his hands. After a few moments of heavy silence, without any definite sign of reaction from either of them, she began again in a voice that seemed to lose some of its prior confidence.
“Dad, I know that you really expected me to go, bringing home all those pamphlets and applications, and I appreciate it, I really do. But, I don't think that it's right for me. I want to go out into the world, earn my way. Like you did.” Brenda's father winced at her last statement, but did not look up. Her mother tittered in the corner, waiting for her husband to speak, but he did not. “I was thinking,” Brenda continued with a hasty glance at her mother, “of getting a job at a coffee shop downtown, saving up some money and maybe moving out to California, you know, to see what life's like out there. I feel like I'm too young to tie myself down for the next four years. I don't think it's right for right now. In the future, who knows, but now I don't think it's right.” Brenda paused hoping, nay pleading in her thoughts that her father would say something, anything to break the terrible silence that surrounded him like an aura. But he said nothing. He nodded his head as he stood and returned to the garage where he remained for the rest of the day, although no sawing or sanding could be heard at all.

After nearly three years, Brenda's half-baked notion of going to California to “see what life's like” had done all things except come to fruition. The ideas of what her future would hold were altered and annotated nearly every single day, and as her friends started off on their personal scholastic journeys, day to day Brenda found herself in the exact same place.
It wasn't long before Brenda gave up her nose ring, let her hair grow back to its natural color, and nearly stopped listening to music entirely. After her friends had gone away there seemed to be no point to it, and as she was working everyday and being, to borrow her own expression, “broken on the wheel” of unskilled laboring, she found no glory, no pride and no satisfaction in it, only a purposeless sacrifice.
Her father did not speak on the matter of her return to school for a year and a half, perhaps giving Brenda the chance to change her mind on her own accord. But, as the deadline for the next fall semester was drawing nearer, he began placing college pamphlets (many of which were for California universities) in the mail each day, hoping that they would catch his daughter's eye. Seeing these made Brenda's heart ache, for she had begun to think that she had been foolish in her decision. Hearing the stories of her friends' experiences and wondering what her life would have been like had she not so stubbornly opposed it, fueled her imagination with fantastic notions of college life.
Yet, something in her heart prevented her from indulging in these fantasies for very long. It was no longer her principles that held her back, nor was it the idea that working life had defeated her, rather without cause or justification she felt that college did not offer the things that she wanted, that submitting to the pressure would involve suppressing something extremely important to her.
When she opened the front door, a brochure for UC Berkeley and UCLA fell from the mail slot and plopped onto the floor in front of her. Without examining them any further she placed them on the kitchen counter and made a beeline for her bedroom. She peeled off her work clothes which reeked of lox and bleach and went into the shower.
As the hot water ran down her body she envisioned another night at home, avoiding her father's questioning stares, quarreling with her little brother over what to watch on television, and rocking the toddler in his rocking-horse. Again and again, the routine was deplorable. Brenda had to get out, if only to wander the streets alone. Her home had become domestic hell which she likened to Sartre's vision of being trapped in the company of people far too familiar. The idea made her long still more to carouse the streets, to exert a freedom of movement guided by nothing but her whim, and a liberty in judgment, right or wrong, as long as it is made by herself alone.
Brenda quickly dressed and as she made her way through the kitchen where her mother was feeding the baby, she merely called out, “I'm going out, mom. I'll come back later.”
“Okay dear,” her mother answered while gently shoveling a spoonful of Cheerios into the toddler's eager mouth.
On the bus ride downtown, Brenda began to feel that it was not particularly solitude that she wished for, but a change of scenery. She suddenly remembered Frieda, one of the only friends from high-school who did not go to college, but unlike Brenda she had opted out of higher education not on principle, rather for the eagerness to start a family of her own. Her fiancée, a man named George who graduated two classes before Brenda, discouraged Frieda from continuing her education on the grounds that a man should always be solely responsible for the financial well being of his family. He considered college an unnecessary expense for someone who would spend the rest of her life rearing and looking after children.
Although Brenda couldn't stand George, Frieda remained one of her only friends and while their opinions were as far from each other as Karl Marx is from Groucho Marx, they always got along very well.
The sun was hanging low in the sky by the time she made it downtown. Passing by the Bovary Café, she saw Steven sitting, his face to the front window, playing bridge with his usual somber and suspicious expression as Victoria lingered over his shoulder. She also caught a glimpse of Eleanor dancing behind the counter for a tall and shady looking man stroking his black goatee as he watched. The scene filled her with the recollection of her day and a shiver of revulsion ran through her as she hurried past on her way to Frieda's.
George opened the door of their third floor apartment almost instantly after Brenda knocked, which wasn't very surprising as the apartment was so small that one could reach the front door from nearly anywhere one happened to be inside.
“Hello,” he spoke slowly with a slight tone of meaning, “what brings you to these parts?” He stood with his right hand stuffed in the side of his white tank top and Brenda could feel his eyes groping her mercilessly as she stood in the open doorway.
“Hey George,” she spoke quickly while trying to look around him, “is Frieda in?”
“Of course, where else could she be?” he answered, making no movement to unblock her path inside.
“Come on,” Brenda spoke with more than a hint of annoyance and pushed past him.
Frieda sat at a small kitchen table, leisurely flipping through the pages of a bridal magazine. As small as the place was, it was remarkably well kept. Not a dish was out of place nor a crumb to be seen. Frieda had been devoting herself to the perfection of her wifely duties while George tried to save enough money for their wedding. She was three months pregnant and already showing. The petite hump on her abdomen was so becoming to her warm, womanly form that one got the feeling that she had been created only to be impregnated.
“Brenda!” she exclaimed with joyous surprise although she had known it was her as soon as George opened the door, “what are you doing here?”
After Frieda embraced her, she had her guest sit in a vacant seat, and immediately put the kettle on for tea then took out a platter of mismatched crackers, fruit and cheese.
The change of scenery proved less satisfying than Brenda had hoped. For the next two hours, Frieda went on and on about her little anxieties, superstitions, the advice of doctors and famous books, her irritability and George's inexhaustible patience with her (which Brenda strongly doubted) and all manners of trifling cares that make young, pregnant women so irresistibly charming. All the while, Brenda felt George's glance clawing all over her, and whenever she looked up at him he winked at her in a way she found incredibly sleazy.
In the end, Brenda left her friend feeling lower than when she entered. Frieda kissed her goodbye (a manner quite recently adopted) and George stood leering at her as if he wished he could do the same but in an entirely different area, then she walked out into the street which had since become quite a dark and lonesome place.
She walked, not quite sure towards where, but glad for every inch of distance from whence she came. When she thought about Frieda, chirping like a caged songbird, she couldn't help but put herself in her shoes and wonder if there could be happiness in her kind of life. Brenda knew that George would be unfaithful to her, most likely many times; she knew that Frieda's existence would be confined to laundry rooms and nurseries; she also knew that she would grow old and have grandchildren and that they may even crowd round her as she exhaled her last motherly sigh; Brenda knew that all of Frieda's labor would be trite and condemned to domesticity; she knew all this, but she still could not rebel against the sorry fate of her high-school friend, she could not look down on her life because for all that, it seemed so much higher than her own, more than that, it seemed grand in its own light as well.
Brenda walked for a long while, again passing the Bovary Café which was now dark and closed up for the night. Peering through the front window at the empty cafe, she rested her eyes on the silent espresso machine reposing like a stoic. Being finished with its labor, it rested soundlessly in patient preparation for the following morning.
She walked on, looking for and expecting nothing to happen. She walked on going nowhere at all.
The moon was high when she came upon a small crowd that was gathered around an orange temporary fence which encircled the side parking lot of a popular bar. Thirty or forty people in their early to mid-twenties gathered around the fence, talking to one another, smoking cigarettes and every so often looking into the empty parking lot as if expecting something any moment. Brenda stopped and mingled with the crowd, nudging her way to the edge of the fence and looking within. There was a sudden hush and a yellow glow cast a shadow on the faces of the spectators. This was followed by a roar of applause, in which Brenda partook, still unaware of what was about to happen.
Soon, a figure emerged from a dark shadow and in each of its hands hung a thick chain, perhaps a yard in length at the end of which was a ball of fire that crackled like a hiss and burned like a torch. It wasn't long before Brenda could see that the figure was Eleanor and her chains were tethers that attached hands to two wild fireballs. Eleanor started to move, to dance, but in a dance so unlike the one she performed for the man with the goatee. This dance was a self-contained explosion that created a cage of flames which played upon the dancer's features but never imprisoned her. It was the control over the elements that could not be tamed; it was absolute freedom contained; it created a gypsy's allure, an artisan's grace, and a madman's sardonic laughter. It was not more beautiful for its danger, it was inseparable from it and as Brenda watched, a passion crawled through her unlike she had ever known, a passion like suffering--a glorious, glorious suffering.

Waiting for Euphoria

Brenda felt dazed for several minutes after the show had ended and the haze from the torches lingered all around her like the smoke from her burnt off emotions, and the darkness in the lot seemed like the sated void that the blaze had left in her mind and her body. Brenda stood at the fence, both her hands clenching the hard plastic barrier which had been warmed by the nearness of the flames. The thrill had passed leaving a stillness although the crowd was still laughing and talking with each other as they walked to the outdoor bar, yet to Brenda the sounds were a hum that her ears had habituated to and not a single word she overheard held a shred of meaning.
If one suggested that Brenda was unusually impressionable at the time, that individual would not be mistaken, but her impressionability was not a product of her naivety or of her youth. There are times when a person's deepest and least understood emotions encounter an exact physical counterpart in the real world. At such times one experiences with the senses all that is intangible within, and the nebulous emotions are funneled into the corporeal and one is relieved of the confusion of trying to sort out one's feelings internally. Such was Brenda's experience.
The two fireballs spiraled outwards on the end of their chains, as if attempting escape but being caught at the last second by their tethers, pulled back around and spun in a new order, a wilder and more frenzied order in which chaos was its foundation. The after images, streaks of white-yellow light which slowly changed red, a bright flame raging then dying. The images were smeared by the barrage of real flames that flew through and behind them, and as the illusions faded off as a series of new ones arrived in their place. If Brenda could have only expressed herself so clearly, as clearly as the fire was able, then perhaps the passion she experienced would not have begun to fade as streaks of light, bright white mulled into dimming red.
The smoky fog began to lift and cars began filling up the lot as if nothing extraordinary had ever happened there. Brenda felt a cold chill breeze through her. She wanted to tell Eleanor how much she enjoyed her dance, but could think of no other excuse than to thank her for inviting her there. Scanning the crowd she only saw a mass of indistinguishable heads gathered around the outdoor bar. Although she was not very inclined to mingle with the somewhat rowdy crowd, Brenda began making her way through it with the hope that talking to Eleanor would again bring to the surface the emotion that she inspired only minutes before.
The crowd was not completely composed of strangers. Near the center of the group, the assistant manager Ben drank a warm Remy Martin out of a short glass shaped like a spade from a deck of cards. He had been conversing with a dark-haired girl about whether a woman's love for a man could be truly immutable or, as Byron had claimed, a woman falls in love not with her lover but with her love. Ben had a way of listening to people that made them feel as if every word that fell from their lips was worthy of being preserved through the ages and inscribed alongside the journals of the great poets. Leaning forward and furrowing his brow as if he struggled to retain every word and nodding every time a nod would give the speaker the sense that Ben had understood perfectly.
He was in the middle of one such nod when he noticed Brenda weaving through the crowd, looking as if she had lost something and had lost herself in her search for it.
“I think you would agree with Tolstoy. Have you read Tolstoy?” The dark-haired woman asked, wetting her deep, crimson lips. Ben nodded, but in a less meaningful way as he had been distracted by the slight girlish form of Brenda Brood who seemed like a matchstick trapped in a heap of dry logs.
“Of course,” Ben answered her, trying to keep Brenda in his sight, “you refer to the 'Kreutzer Sonata.'” It was fortunate for Ben that she had in fact referred to that story, for it had been the only bit of Tolstoy he had read.
“Right,” she answered, flipping her back her hair and leaning in towards him so that he could smell the jasmine perfume that emanated from her breasts, “he saw love as carnal and dependent on a physical desire which once satisfied breeds animosity. That what we see as love is, is not the high and spiritual kinships and respect between two people, but an expression to possess and dominate. You remember, Tolstoy advocated the absolute banishment of sexual intercourse---”
“Which he claimed would lead to the perfection of Mankind,” Ben interrupted almost without thinking, having lost sight of Brenda momentarily. “And the human species would no longer have any need to propagate having attained absolute godliness.”
Although his answer was pointed and correct for the conversation, an inflection in his voice made the dark-haired woman feel that he was no longer interested. She saw him looking over her shoulder and sipping his cognac distractedly as she was coming to her final point, at which time Ben would usually appear enraptured. She moved in closer to him, her low-cut blouse opening slightly.
He looked at her and raised his Byronic brows. That kind of coquetry had become so wearisome recently. When he looked at her red lips and white breasts he watched a parade of similar lips and breast flow before his mind's eye. How simple it all was, none of the passion that he had read in poetry ever visited his sexual encounters, none of the euphoria that great men spoke of when they spoke of love flooded his heart when he lay beside a woman and felt the sweat dry on his chest. He had noticed that sex had become mechanical for him and more recently, the act of courting had become so as well.
He sought out Brenda once more and spotted her standing with Eleanor at the other end of the bar. Most men buy women drinks when they want to begin a conversation, Ben bought them when he wanted to end one. It was to give the woman some sort of compensation for the loss of his poetical mind.
After paying for the dark-haired woman's drink, Ben excused himself in a way that neither implied he was leaving nor committed him to return. The woman saw him off with a bright red smile that curved downwards when he had gone. As she turned towards the bar she looked at her drink with something like disdain.
His Remy Martin still warming his palm, Ben made his way through the crowd until he reached the corner where Eleanor and Brenda stood talking loudly.
“Benji!” Eleanor shouted when he approached, “look what I've found. I've got a new fan.”
“I see that.” He looked down at Brenda with dark and meaningful eyes. “I have never seen you outside of the cafe before. Hast the night drawn you out of your cavern?”
Brenda was not exactly sure what he had meant by this, but through the limited contact she had had with him at work, she knew that he was given to abstract phraseology.
“No, she came to see me,” Eleanor proclaimed in a playfully accusatory fashion, “and she didn't just sit at the bar talking to some slut while I was performing either.”
Ben smiled and gave another meaningful look to Brenda. “Well, she must be very devoted. I must take up fire dancing myself, perhaps I could entice her to venture into the city to see me as well.”
Eleanor laughed, not because she found the idea particularly amusing, but because she felt that laughing. “Perhaps you could give a public reading. You know,” Eleanor turned to Brenda and slid her arm around her waist, “Benji is a terrible poet, he once made a girl cry at the cafe because he insisted on reading ten stanzas about a sea turtle who shared his shell with John Milton, ha ha!”
Ben laughed at this as well, although it was completely true, and moved closer to Brenda. Brenda was feeling overwhelmed. She never went out to bars, being underage, and she had never fraternized with her coworkers outside of the cafe. And although she tried not to notice, she knew that Ben was looking at her with intention in his gaze. At first she thought it was his normal intense personality, but after a while of standing with him she was certain that there was something more.
Eleanor had been dragged off by a small group of girls with similar tattoos and bright purple blushes, and Ben led Brenda to the bar where he ordered another cognac and a rum and Coke for her.
“I really don't drink,” Brenda told him as he slid the cocktail towards her. “My friends always thought I was a light-weight.”
“Your friends probably don't know what you're capable of.” He spoke with his lips behind the glass and a knowing look in his eyes. Brenda blushed while taking the proffered drink and sipped timidly from the straw.
“I would like to hear some of your poetry, although John Milton in the tortoise shell seems a little too much for me.” Brenda was surprised by the free and easy manner of her speech.
“Between two worlds life hovers like a star, twixt night and morn, upon horizon's verge.” Ben began plagiarizing shamelessly, but Brenda listened with an open mind, already feeling the effects of the strong beverage.
After several moments of evoking Lord Byron, Ben stopped and looked at the interest with which Brenda listened. Even he knew that he could not have gotten away with such blatant plagiarism and he added parenthetically that he felt so close to Byron's poetry that he often felt that it was his own.
The revelation did not have the least impact on Brenda who, quite without noticing it, had finished her drink and Ben had ordered her another.

Outside of the Rialto, Steven sat on the curb and waited for his cousin to leave the club. The night had gone as he had expected. Drew discovered, once they were paying the cover at the door, that he had only seven dollars in his wallet and his paycheck wasn't going to go through the bank until Monday. Rather than go through the hassle of his cousin chasing him down each time he wanted to buy a woman a drink, Steven gave him sixty dollars with the oath that Drew would get no more from him that night. But, the money was soon gone and Steven handed out another forty without even bothering to make a similar oath.
Steven spent most of the evening sitting by himself at the bar drinking much more than was his habit and feeling lower and lower the more lively and active the club became. After the first few drinks, Steven tried to buy a drink for a chubby girl with pink cheeks wearing a blue polyester tube-top, but she merely shook his head at him in a way that didn't quite decline the drink, but Steven himself. A short time later his glasses were emptied at a quicker pace and when Steven stood to use the restroom, every ounce of alcohol rushed to his brain and he felt heavily intoxicated.
Drew Parrot was standing on the edge of the dance floor, tightly holding a tall blond around her waist and dribbling out his words over the bass driven dance music. Steven waddled over to him.
“I, think I'm gonna, I'm gonna go outside for air. Um, are you coming?” Steven asked slowly, giving great care to each syllable he forced from his mouth.
“What? It's early man, and Sheryl here has some friends coming...you know buddy, you know, you can't keep moping at the bar all night.” Drew turned to the blond, “This is my cousin, Steve-o,” he introduced her to him then spoke something that sounded to Steven like “wet blanket” into her ear. She laughed freely exposing two rows of bleached teeth.
“Whatever,” Steven answered, “I'll be outside.” He turned to go, but Drew was right behind him trying to stay him by the arm.
“Listen, man, who's your friend? But anyway listen, just loan me twenty more, I told this chick I'd get her one of those shots they light on fire and I'm broke. Just ten more minutes then we'll go.” Drew could drink a pond and still act as sober as a vicar and as Steven listened to his words a flood of anger, either towards Drew, or himself, or his hopeless situation filled him, yet being too drunk to act out physically, he deeply scowled and flung the bill at him as he went to the door.
Drew appeared twenty minutes later with Sheryl the Blond hanging on his neck. “There he is!” Drew exclaimed as if he had been at a loss of how to find his cousin for the past twenty minutes. “Listen, we're going to get some grub and then meet some of her girls at the Royal. Come on Eeyore, we'll find your tail for ya!” Drew laughed haughtily and if Steven had been one drink less drunk the laugh would have driven him to punch him square in the mouth. But, as it were, Steven stood and followed his cousin mutely.
In the all-night diner, Steven's gloominess was so present that it even had an effect on his cousin and inspired in him a grotesque pity that was such a strange experience for Drew that he whispered in Sheryl's ear that she should try to cheer him up a bit.
Sheryl excused herself and went to the lady's room. When she returned, she sat on Steven's side of the booth, so near him that she almost fitted in his lap. She began playing with his fingers and trying to look him in the eyes, and to the surprise of both Drew and the blond, Steven began cheering up rather quickly.
“Why so down, did some pretty lady break your heart?” the pretty blond asked condescendingly.
“Not at all, she won't even look at me,” Steven answered, turning his face to her.
“Awww, how sad. I bet she doesn't know what she's missing. Does she, Drew?”
“This guy is worth his weight in platinum!” He answered, cutting his Belgium waffle in two with a single slice.
Steven looked at Sheryl and felt brightened by her feigned concern. “I don't know, maybe I'm just a little scared to say anything. You know, she's not like any girl I ever met...she so different, and special, and there's no one that I have ever met like her.” Steven was very drunk. Still very drunk.
“There, there” Sheryl said, stroking his arm with her slender fingers and sticking her tongue out at Drew who rolled in his seat, feeling extremely pleased that the alien feeling of empathy had released him.
When Steven had paid the bill and they left the diner his disposition was very much improved. Sheryl walked between the two men with her arms locked with both. As they approached the Royal, Sheryl and Drew left Steven and joined the group that they had come to meet, while Steven remained rooted at the entrance having caught a glimpse of something that deeply surprised him.
Turned towards the bar, Steven saw Eleanor's profile distinctly. She stood with three girls who surrounded her in a semi-circle and seemed to laugh at every word that she spoke. What Steven was thinking, I doubt that even he could say, but without missing a beat he approached her as if determined to accomplish something. The episode in the diner had given Steven confidence, and Sheryl's warm skin and alluring smell had incited a long suppressed lust to bubble all through him.
Eleanor noticed her manager when he was three steps away. She turned towards him with an ironic smile and put her two fists on her hips in the Norse goddess fashion that Steven had noticed earlier that day. Seeing this pose made Steven's heart palpitate and a shiver of anxiety overtook him. But it was too late and he could not stop.
He could do nothing but speak. “Hey—Eleanor,” each of her laughing friends fell silent and looked him over, their lips fashioned suddenly into subtle sneers.
“Oh, hey Steven,” she replied, looking sardonically at each of her friends in turn.
“Hey, listen can I buy you a drink—you all a drink?” Steven's timidity was forcing a sobriety on him and he felt painfully aware of their mocking smiles.
“Steven, you can't fuck me.” Eleanor spoke with such assurance and evenness that Steven for a moment doubted what he heard. The girls began to snicker. “Seriously, you will never get to fuck me.”
Steven tried to answer, to assure her that that was never his intention and that he just wanted to make a polite gesture and buy her a drink. But, like all ridiculously absurd untruths, it was difficult to create on the spot.
“If you still want to spend your money it's up to you,” the girls broke out in loud and chilling laughter and Eleanor stood like a stone, her fists driven into her hips as she rained down her fury on a simple, yet not quite undeserving mortal who could do nothing but hang his head in shame and leave the bar in silence.

  Night and Morn

Ben sat near her, hovering over her, his heavy breath was a cognac scented breeze that grazed her flushed cheek, but all Brenda saw was two pale gray eyes peering at them both from a rear-view mirror. Staring into the mirror, she had hoped to catch her own reflection to understand what position she had actually placed herself in, yet there were only two strange eyes embedded in the cab-driver's heavy face. She felt his fingers running up her arm, surely and with the fearlessness of a venomous arachnid and as the taxi blew past storefronts and street lamps, their four-sided glare ran over them both like a curse.
It seemed that at every moment Ben moved nearer, slowly moving his lips in a position in which Brenda could easily fall upon. His hands were like two hooks exploring her body for a suitable crevice to latch into.
“I have always thought you more beautiful than you have thought of yourself.” She heard Ben say, from somewhere, perhaps from somewhere in Barbados. “Why won't you look at me?”
Brenda could not turn her neck, she felt that the moment she faced him she would enter into an agreement that she felt uncertain about, “I can't right now.” The thick brow in the mirror flattened with curiosity or disappointment and the pale gray eyes widened.
She felt that an agreement had already been made when she entered the taxi with him, when she neglected to push his hand away when she felt its weight on her knee. But the conversation was so thrilling! He spoke of vague poets with such fluency and passion, poets that she had known in the way that she knew a platypus or Betelgeuse or Portuguese. And his dark eyes watched her every movement with intensity that gave her interest and importance usually reserved for a solar eclipse, his dark shadow passing before her burning heart.
“I could look upon you for days,” Ben whispered in her ear. She looked again at the eyes in the mirror and a chill ran through her.
The cab stopped abruptly at a traffic light. Brenda lurched forward and found herself completely wrapped in his arms. While positioning herself back into her seat, she fell into his embrace unwittingly and turned her eyes to him. A moment later she felt his lips on hers, his rough stubble felt like small thorns on her delicate flesh.
The cab moved again, but slowly. For the first moments Ben lips kissed a flaccid and pliable mouth, one that seemed not to rebuff his attention, but failed to understand it altogether. Yet he persisted, kneading loose dough into firmer stuff and after several moments Brenda's lips answered his budding enthusiasm.
Once Ben felt her lips had been sufficiently titillated, he drew back to look meaningfully into her eyes, but Brenda only saw the two gray orbs in the rear-view mirror, smirking at her with ostensible pleasure.
They had to walk up four flights of stairs to reach Ben's apartment. At every landing Ben pulled her towards him and kissed her lips and her neck with constant vigor. Brenda succumbed to each embrace without protest, but by the third landing she thought to herself “here he goes again,” as he pulled her dramatically, imagining that each flight and each embrace was taking her deeper and deeper into the euphoria and enchantment of his fervent arms.
“By the fourth landing she won't know which way is up,” Ben thought with pleasure and pride.
Brenda, as if intuiting his thoughts, saw the fourth landing draw nearer and nearer as if it were a pedestal or a scaffold.
They stood before his door. Taking both of her hands in his, he pulled her to him once more, their arms spread out as if catching the wind and their lips locked together as if fighting against its gale. By this time all Brenda could taste was cognac and all Ben could taste was victory. He quickly fished his keys from his front pocket and led the young girl into his dark apartment.
Ben had not turned on the lights and only two rays of moonshine showed through a half curtained window. His hands ran all over her body, almost as if they were searching for something hidden in its creases. They ran down her ribs, exploring every curve of her waist and her hips before they crept to her backside and settled there, again kneading until the desired firmness was attained. Meanwhile, his lips traced her cheeks, her chin and the nape of her neck, planting loud sucking kisses wherever they may land.
Brenda tried to lose herself in the moment, in the dark apartment and in the man with the dark eyes. Her own mind was filled with darkness, but from within the darkness the quiet echo of her thoughts reverberated in the vacant space. She pictured the explosion of fire; she flipped through the university brochures; she saw Frieda's tiny pregnant belly; she smelt the cheap beer on the breath of an early morning customer. “If only he would flip on a light,” Brenda thought as she allowed herself to be moved into any stance that suited him, “then I could at least see what is going on.”
Ben was presently on his knees, lifting up the fold of her blouse and planting small kisses on her white stomach. She ran her hands through his hair, at a loss on what to do with them otherwise. At a loss of what to do with herself, her mind wandered. She was going to sleep with him, a man who had not spoken more than two dozen words to her in the nearly two years she had worked with him. Something wasn't right, but wrong? What was wrong? Who was she to be so prudish and proud? Yet, no man had ever seemed so passionate about her. Freddy, when they had sex he seemed to try to push her off his mother's bed with short and rapid jerks. But, not all men made love like Fred, she was sure, and to go on believing that would be to go on believing that there was really no moon because it was overcast one night. And there, the moon hovered and shone bright through the window. It was the only light she could see in that dark apartment.
As Ben stood to his feet he lifted Brenda blouse over her head and threw it on the floor. Looking upon her, Ben felt a twinge of conscience. When he first saw her at the bar, it was her slightness and fragile frame that had attracted him. So many women had flouted their voluptuous figures before him, large breasts, wide and sensuous hips, full womanly arms, and here stood a woman who seemed no more than a girl, half undressed and seeming to shiver in his warm apartment. He had to remind himself that she was not a girl; she was a woman despite the smallness of her breasts and the protrusion of the clearly outlined ribcage. Even by the dim light of the moon, Ben could see that she was overcome with timidity. An inexperienced girl who has never fallen in love or, God forbid, never was with a man before in her life!
“Brenda,” he whispered to her as he rested his hands on her slender shoulders, “are you alright? Something tells me that you may be unsure about this and I would not want to rush you into anything.”
“I am alright,” she answered, for a moment surprised that she neglected to place the word “not” between the verb and its modifier. “I've done this before. I'm not a kid you know.” As was her character, she was to stick to her decision, for good or for ill, and see it through to the end.
The assertion being brought out of mere consciousness and into reality soothed Ben's over-cautious conscience and he led her into his bedroom where there was not even a moon to guide them.
His comforter was soft and cool. As Brenda lay upon it, she saw only a shadowed form climb over her. She heard him strip off his shirt and unbuckle his belt. She then felt him fumbling with the buttons on her jeans and heard him shout, “ah-ha!” when he got them undone. She soon lay completely stripped of clothing and Ben disappeared totally into the darkness for a minute. When he returned she heard the rustling of a foil or plastic wrapper. After several more seconds of lying completely exposed to the pitch blackness, she felt the bed move and two hairy legs rubbed against her own.
Again, Brenda wished for a light. Her four remaining senses did not help her to decide how she felt about the situation. The eye in her mind could focus on anything but it.
He leaned on her, his body felt heavy and covered with dense hair. Between her thighs, something soft and slippery crawled like a blind creature. “Ugh,” she heard then a softer, more desperate, “come on,” and again “come on.”
Two stern lips quickly pressed against hers and a roaming hand squeezed her breasts. The motions stopped almost as suddenly as they began and another, “come one, come on” softly penetrated the rustle of sheets and the squeaking mattress.
Soon the weight was off of her and Brenda wondered if she had perhaps missed something. “Is everything alright?” she asked the heavy object that lay on the bed beside her.
She heard a deep sigh and more quietly, “too much cognac, damn it, too much.” Then more loudly he spoke, “I don't know, I just--” he let off there and sighed once more.
Brenda felt almost like an unwanted guest, that she had somehow forced herself on him and he relented out of pity or out of an obligation that he now regretted. If she could see the rueful expression on his face then this notion would have been confirmed instantly.
Ben knew he had to speak, that he had to explain himself, but he could summon no Romantic verses that appropriately described his current predicament, although he was reasonably certain it had happened to Don Juan twice or thrice and Byron conveniently omitted it from his histories. Several times he attempted to speak, but each time could not summon the words. After several minutes the cognac assumed control over the rest of his facilities and he fell into a deep morphine sleep unpricked by a shattered ego.
When Brenda heard the rhythmic breathing of her slumbering partner, her mind began to race and sleep became the last thing she expected. Should she stay? Could she go? And to where, and how? The buses had long stopped running and the apartment was so strange and dark that she doubted whether she could even collect her scattered articles of clothing. Yet, she could not stay. But she must, there was no choice. Work at eight-thirty tomorrow. She did not have her uniform with her, and there was no time to go home and get it. But the mall will be open, perhaps--and he, he will work tomorrow too, being Friday, and she will be there when he arrives. How would he look at her then? But she didn't care much for that. What had just happened and how to escape if such an escape is possible?
Many thoughts raced through her head and she felt restless and trapped until the sun rose and its light spilled into the bedroom. She moved about noiselessly collecting her clothing then soundlessly left her passionate suitor sleeping off the effects of an ill-suited love affair.

The espresso machine whirred and hissed, releasing its pent up steam within a metal jug of foaming milk. Brenda's quivering hand felt the jug until the heat nearly scorched it. Wearing a brand new pair of black slacks and a white shirt which still showed the creases from when it was factory pressed, Brenda tried to hide her fatigue from Steven who seemed to be in an unusually foul mood that morning.
Claude approached the counter wearing his potato-sack dress, as it was the eighth of May. It was a long canvas sack with three holes cut out for a head and arms, and as he watched him Steven felt like he had been pushed nearly to the limits of his endurance. While taking the Frenchman's order, Steven wondered if he alone was the last sane person in a world gone completely mad. There seemed to be no order in it, no purpose, everything was allowed to go on in whichever way it pleased with no thoughts of the future or respect for the past. Steven had done everything right, followed the straight and narrow path, the road most traveled; he abhorred risk, shunned temptation, was diligent in the fulfillment of his duties, but the world did not respect him for it, it mocked and abused him.
Hardly a moment passed without Steven feeling dread at the coming of three o'clock, the beginning of Eleanor's shift. He had resolved to slip out several minutes before three on some errand, leaving Brenda to watch the place until she arrived. When the morning rush died off and it approached two-thirty, he found Brenda resting on the salad station in the kitchen.
“Brenda, I've got to go to the bank and leave you alone until---Eleanor, until Eleanor comes in. Can you handle it?” Steven spoke gruffly, without even feigned concern for his employee's ability to “handle it.” He was about to turn away, but something about Brenda's silence made him curious and compelled him to look at her more closely.
The dark circles under her eyes and her pale and clammy skin became quite obvious in the bright fluorescent kitchen lights.
“Are you okay?” Steven queried, his gruffness softening into stern authoritarianism, with a hint of annoyance that her indisposition may spoil his plans.
Brenda nodded and turned her head away, but not before he could see that her two wide eyes were brimming with tears.
Be whatever he may, Steven was not made of stone and seeing tears in the eyes of that pale young woman briefly summoned, but was easily checked, tears to his own eyes. Steven was about to command her to tell him what on earth was the matter with her, but it stopped before it escaped him. He leaned on the door jamb and looked out the window facing the alley-way. For several moments they stood in such silence, neither venturing to appear occupied with anything other than their own thoughts.
“I don't mean to be so harsh to you,” Steven began, quite surprised by the words that actually did escape him, “I, no---I never meant—it's just the...that sometimes things turn out different than you expect them. Sometimes it's impossible to know what people are thinking, you know. And, um, if I'm harsh it's only because it’s because I don't know.”
Brenda looked at the manager with an expression of such open curiosity that she almost felt comfortable being alone with him. She wondered how he could have known, or at least echoed, exactly what she had been thinking when her eyes filled with tears.
“It's okay. I'm alright.” Brenda answered after a moment of silence. “You have to hurry if you're going to catch the bank before it closes.”
Steven shot her a questioning look before he recalled his fabricated excuse. “Right,” he answered, trying to assume his customary hardness, but failing, “it shouldn't be long before she arrives, so I have to go.”
He was on his way out the door when he thought of his last words to her. Did they give him away? Did they expose his true reasons for leaving early? Someone who thought less about their own position in life, who did not have more weighting on them than the intrigues of her co-workers, someone who did not have more questions than daily life was disposed to answer may have found it odd, but Brenda was no such person.
Steven had spent more time in the kitchen than he had intended and as he opened the door to leave the cafe, Eleanor was just coming in.
“Look who it is!” Eleanor proclaimed with a wide cynical smile. “You're off so early, how come?”
“The bank.” Steven muttered as he slid past her, averting his eyes.
“The bank? It closed at two today, you big silly!” Eleanor shouted down the street after Steven's rapidly shrinking form and in full hearing of several regulars who were getting ready for their night.

“But we need a fourth,” Uriel pleaded with Doug who was in the middle of inviting a slight young man to his studio, “and Claude won't play because it's 1945 Victory Day, and he's afraid he'll lose.”
Doug smiled and shook his silvered head, then answered in a southern accent that had a slight lisp, “I'm sorry Urey; I can't stand that game.” He left Uriel, Peter Longweller and The Hamster forlorn at the table as Victoria volunteered herself as a novice but teachable bridge player. They looked at each other to discern whether or not to accept.
Doug approached the counter to get a refill on his coffee. Brenda was wiping down the espresso machine. “Hey there, Janet,” he spoke. Doug always called Brenda “Janet” because he said she reminded him of Jane Eyre.
Brenda turned to him and gave him a sad smile. “Hey Doug, would you like another?”
“Not from such a sad creature,” he answered after one look at her face. “What's wrong Janet, Mr. Rochester keeping secrets from you again?” He gave her a broad and winning grin to which, as low and exhausted as Brenda felt, she could not help but reciprocate.
She took his mug from him and began refilling it. “Doug,” she said as she handed him the fresh coffee, “I wonder, what do people live for?” He smiled at the question as if urging her to continue and elaborate, “I mean, is there any point in life when things just are what they seem, that a person starts to know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it? I sometimes feel pulled in every direction, but restrained by something inside me that keeps me exactly where I am. I long to move, but I can't, I can't because, as soon as I see what I want it changes into something I don't want or disappears completely. Is there anything in life that's constant and real?”
Doug smiled and nodded his head as he listened to Brenda, her questions seemed so familiar yet so distant. Doug crossed his arms on the counter and leaned over to the young girl, who looked at him as if he truly held the answers she desired. He leaned in closer and spoke with gravity. “Janet, the only thing worth looking for in life,” he paused and looked at the young man who was then examining his prints on the wall, “is great sex.”
Brenda laughed, and how could she help but laugh when at that very moment Ben walked through the door and hurried into the kitchen without so much as looking Brenda in the eye. When the laughter faded off Brenda looked at the friendly old painter and her restless heart was still for a moment. He left her with a smile and without a word and returned to the young man he hoped to paint. Brenda removed her apron, tossed it in the laundry bag and left the cafe wondering if she would ever go back again, and she concluded: Yes, yes she would.