Sonya days

Literary Review, Wntr, 2005 by Jamie Schwartz

I drove to the Key Food to pick up fruit punch, soda, pretzels, popcorn, fresh milk, vanilla ice cream, and favors for the fourteen six year olds who would soon occupy my living room. Sonya woke up that morning singing and dancing. I'd had a few too many glasses of wine the night before, and her chirpy voice made me squint. I thought about giving her some Dimetap and letting her take a mid-morning nap. I almost did it, thinking it would make her more vibrant for the birthday party, but I stopped myself. She sat at the kitchen table, splashing the back of her spoon into a bowl of Cheerios, her legs kicking back and forth under the table. I planned to let Sonya pick out caramels and mints in the metallic wrappers from the barrels of bulk candy in the food store, but at the last minute I called my mother to watch her while I ran to the Key.

The parking lot was full and I inched around the lanes, waiting for somebody to pull out. A big woman with a screaming baby wedged into her armpit was dragging two carts full of packages to her car. I followed behind her and waited with my blinker on as she bent into the back of her car and strapped the baby into the car seat. She came around to the trunk and started loading in bag after bag. I saw white bread and frozen chicken nuggets poking out and I immediately formed a disdainful judgment of this woman. She looked over at me. I guess she thought I was giving her a dirty look for taking too long, because she screwed up her face, letting a lungfull of air seep from her pursed lips, "Pssssssssss." She started moving more slowly, arranging the bags snugly in the trunk.

I always get in these situations where I'm misunderstood, taken as an asshole when I'm really a lovely woman. I wanted to stick my head out the window and shout, "No! I wasn't giving you a dirty look. I was just watching you load your food!" But you can't do that. Once someone is offended, you can't fix it without running around in circles. She slammed the trunk down hard, and as she walked around to the driver's side, she flipped me the bird.

I pulled into the parking spot and sat there for a few minutes with my elbows propped on the steering wheel, my face in my hands. I felt guilty for wanting to drug my daughter. I felt guilty for not bringing her with me and letting her rummage through the candy. She was a normal child, energetic but not hyperactive. No attention deficit. She could sit on the floor for two to three hours at a time, playing with dominoes. She'd stack them up higher and higher until they toppled; then she'd laugh to herself and start over. Once in a while she'd call out to show me the eight-inch-high tower she'd created and I'd smile half-heartedly and go back to my book. "That's great, honey."

I looked up and realized that there was a car sitting behind me, waiting for me to pull out. A bald man was leaning out his window, slapping his crimson door. I got out and waved to him. I was embarrassed. "Jesus lady," he shouted and screeched away.

"Damn it," I said to myself. I slammed the car door. Then I felt bad about slamming the car door. We owned a 1987 Ford Escort that was on the brink of falling apart completely. Sometimes, while driving, I'd have cartoonish visions of the dark green doors, the striped hood, the automotive innards coming loose, flying off the car; and bouncing into a ditch, leaving me puttering along the highway in a stripped metal frame. All the other drivers would pass my smoking wreck, staring at me like I was a lunatic.

My husband constantly begged me to be gentle with the car. He thought that I gunned the engine too much, that I let the gas, get too low, that I somehow got crumbs in the radiator by throwing empty pretzel bags on the floor, that I was rough with the knobs of the radio (which, without my interference, changed stations as we went over small bumps and cracks in the road), and that I was, in effect, trying to kill the car so that we would have to buy a new one.

"She's old. You've got to treat her right," he told me the night before, stroking the dashboard. He'd had a few drinks too. "You hear me, babe?" I stared at him blankly. His small red mouth curled up at the corner. "You're just waiting for her to die," he said, running his hand up my thigh as we pulled to a stoplight. "You're just pushing her towards the cliff."

I often wondered whether this accusation was true. I'd watched him soap up the car in the driveway the Saturday before. I stared at the wet car, covered in bubbles, and had no feeling about it one way or the other. I suppose I wouldn't have minded a new car, one that had air-conditioning, but I didn't care enough to pursue a new car.

I headed through the parking lot towards the grocery store, tossing a tote bag over my shoulder I'd gotten the bag from Channel Thirteen, when I pledged eighty dollars while watching a six-hour documentary mini-series about Abraham Lincoln. After Abe and Mary's son Willie died, Mary broke down. She staved in bed all day long for weeks, for months, refusing all visitors and ignoring her other children. One night the President took her over to the window and pointed through the night to a large lit building. Her told her to get a hold of herself or they might have to send her to the loony bin. Scared straight.