“They come down sometimes, kind of like now.”
I shook my head, recalled to reality “What?”
“The walls,” she said. “They come down sometimes. Kind of like now.”
Across the table sat a woman a good bit older. We were the only two in the truck stop diner aside from a waitress too tired to notice any more and a cook.
“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “Guess I kind of drifted off for a second.” The woman drew long on a cigarette and blew the smoke up towards the ceiling. I didn’t even remember her lighting that one. An ashtray overflowed with the filtered corpses of other smokes. She never seemed to be without one in her hand.
“It’s okay,” she said smiling. “It’s getting pretty late.” As she looked outside the window, the shade of a tear dotted the corner of her eye. “Snow isn’t letting up.”
“No, it sure isn’t.” When you return to talk of the weather after several hours of conversation, it’s as if the barrier of polite distance goes back up. You’ve returned to the start, once again casual strangers, not the anonymous intimates of stranded travelers.
“You want some more coffee?” I asked.
“Yeah.” But as she turned to flag the waitress, I touched her arm.”No, wait. I’ll get it. I think I know where everything is now. Besides, it looks like she’s asleep.” When I sat back down, the woman was intent on folding a paper napkin in some pattern.
“There,” she said putting a crumpled wad on the table. I didn’t know what to make of it. “It’s a paper rose.” She never took her eyes off the napkin. “I used to make these a long time ago. Guess I was a lot better at it then. I used to make these while sitting in diners with my girlfriends, and I’d make a dozen of them, and it was like my true love gave them to me. Dozen real roses. A real love. Then we’d leave and someone would wipe her face with it before redoing her makeup and throw it back down.”
“So no real true love?”
“I was in high school. I was stupid. It seems we all thought there was a Mr. Right out there. We saw him on TV singing to us. If we could only find a guy like Richie Valens or Bobby Venton. The guys at school just weren’t sensitive like them. At least, that’s what we thought. Then you’d find someone.” She leaned back and smiled, arm on the window ledge. “I always ended up with just the right someone, the quarterback or the baseball captain. They never were really that right. We’d break up eventually, usually after the season was over. You had to keep up a front that long or else you’d look stupid. So until then I had to put up with drunk guys who only had their manhood to prove whether it was with me or someone else.”
Watching her I could see her as the beautiful, blond teen-angel she must have once been. Out of my league. I’d have been embarrassed to steal a quick glance if we had grown up together. She would have been polite when I talked to her in class, but I knew she would wrinkle her nose in surprise when her friends asked, “you like him?”
Now with the safety of years she was talking to me. She was at least twice my (then) twenty-two years and her efforts to hold off time were failing. The unique scars of that battle showed their shadows around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. I was also the only other person aside from the staff trapped in the truck stop with whom she could wait out the blizzard. Girls like… no, women like her are used to being just a cut above everyone else. They are more aware of class. She couldn’t have comfortably talked to the waitress.
“So what happened with the boys?”
“What?”
“The boys, what happened with them?”
“Oh, nothing. I wouldn’t give in. See. I knew I had something special that made me worth a little more. Each guy wanted to be the first. As soon as I lost that, I’d lose all my advantage. So they had their girls they could get with and still come back to me.” She stubbed out her cigarette and immediately reached for another. “Everyone would know, but no one would really know and I would still be up there. Still the one with the date to homecoming; the one with her picture in the yearbook.”
“You liked having your picture in there, didn’t you?”
“Well, I suppose.” She took a sip of coffee and puffed. “Yea, I would have to say definitely. I even knew then and the reason is the same today. When you open up your yearbook from school, there is some couple in there who looks really good. They were always the envy of everyone, even if they didn’t spend a lot of time together except to be seen. I want to be the one noticed.” I let my finger trace circles in the fog on the windows. “Don’t laugh,” she said as she smiled back. “Yeah, we all really just wanted to be seen. It’s just that those who couldn’t would pretend like they didn’t want it.”
Her look changed to greater seriousness. She reached out for her paper rose. “Don’t think bad of me, it’s just the truth.” I’m not sure if she thought my look was judging. “Do you think I’m telling the truth?”
“Yeah…”
“Then, it’s a lot better isn’t it?”
“Well, it just seems a little funny to hear it.”
She looked out the window, her expression changing to disappointment as she tossed the rose down. “You mean shallow. Why can’t you be honest enough to say ’shallow’?”
Keeping my eyes turned down I explained, “Well, it seems a little rude. I don’t really know you.”
“But it’s what you were thinking and it really doesn’t take that long to get to know someone as much as you need to. We’re all shallow and all deep. You’ll never get to know more than the shallow parts of anyone anyway.” She blew an angry cloud of smoke and stubbed out another cigarette. “See, I could already tell enough about you to know you were lying.”
I reached for the rose and fumbled with it as we sat in silence for a few minutes.
“Well,” she said, “I’m getting some more coffee. Want some?”
“No thanks.” As she refilled her cup I shifted myself again, the cold seeping in through the window glass. When she came back she had regained her tired smile and stood looking at me.
“What?”
She slid into her seat, still smiling. “Oh, nothing. It’s the walls again. You looked like my son there for a second.”
“You have a son?”
“Don’t be so surprised.” She tasted her coffee and then adjusted the flavor. “Yes, he’s about your age I guess, maybe a little younger. He’s kinda handsome.”
“Do you have a picture?”
“Oh… no. No, I don’t.”
“Do you have any pictures?”
“No.” She reached for another cigarette. “Anyway,” she said quickly, “it doesn’t really matter. I haven’t seen him for a long time.”
“Why not?”
“He’s off at school.”
“Didn’t you see him for the holidays last week?”
“No… No, he couldn’t get away.” I let the matter drop from conversation though not from thought. “Sometimes you can hear them before they come down.”
“Hear what?”
“The walls.”
I waited a few seconds then confessed, “Guess I wasn’t really listening the first time you said that. What walls?”
She sat staring out the window, her cheek cradled in her palm, the cigarette smoke rising through her hair. “The walls that separate this world from the dream world. Sometimes they come down a little bit and it’s not as easy to tell the difference of where you are. Some of the dream world sneaks into reality. Sometimes they come crashing down and everything spills every which way, especially if you’re standing close to the wall. And sometimes there’s a loud yell like the trumpets just before the walls fell.”
“Jericho?”
“Yeah. I can jerk myself awake from a dream and find myself in another dream and then another dream and then I really can’t tell if I’m in the real world now or if it’s just a haze that’s going to go away and I’m really much younger and much happier.” The ignored end of her cigarette grew a longer and longer ash. “But as you get older those walls crumble anyway and there’s nothing you can really do to put them back up.”
She continued to stare. Suddenly she dropped her cigarette on the table. “I have to go.” Reaching for her purse she frantically pulled money out. Other papers fell out and scattered as well and she scrambled to gather them back. I didn’t know what to say as she stood and pulled her belongings about her quickly and threw some cash on the table. She mumbled, “Too much. That’s too much. Too much.” She hurried towards the exit and out into the night. The sound of the bell on the door woke the waitress at the counter. Two bright headlights suddenly appeared then disappeared into the snowy darkness.
Something was burning. I looked down and saw the end of a cigarette caught on the rose napkin. Angry red lights consumed the edges, quickly moving towards the heart of the flower, never igniting a flame and leaving scant ash behind. I smothered the embers with my jacket sleeve and the waitress walked over.
“She left in a huff,” the waitress declared. She gathered the trash, coffee cups and dollar bills. “You want more?” she asked, reaching down to pick up something from the floor.
Looking at the ashes on my sleeves “No thanks. Maybe some water.”
“Here, you dropped something,” she said. On the table she tossed a worn picture of the woman and a young man seated together. The woman had a strained smile as his arms were caught loosely about her shoulders in a hug. He possessed a rounded face and uncomfortably wide grin of a man who would never think above the most basic, childish level.
I laid the picture down and stared out the window again and heard a car horn blow in the distance.