A Day or a Lifetime by lilacaraby
by
Cathy Nolan Vincevic
She looked out the window of the welfare office. The clouds were low, dark, suffering against the landscape. Remains of what was once clean, white snow--brittle, dirty, too tired to even melt--rubbed up against sign of the motel across the street.
“Rooms for Rent for a day...or a lifetime”
So inviting.
Listening to the murmuring in the rooms around her, she heard the same story over and over again. About to be kicked out of the apartment, lost the job, mom told them they couldn’t move in with her again, and the kids were hungry. Stories of corroded lives with no where to go.
.
They could all move into the Cadillac Motel across the way.
She watched the denizens of the endless motel shuffle in and out of their rooms.
How could everything look so flat?
She imagined lifting out of the chair and float across the lot, down across the Merrimack River, the sky staying flat the whole way.
The blue-black clouds smothered even the bricks to gray.
One day, she thought, I might have to move into that place, The Cadillac Motel. Rent a room and get an old t.v., sit in there with the mustard yellow stained carpet, the shag gone all misty with use, puke, and old man sweat, turn up the volume to annoy the neighbors and shout obscenities at anyone who passed by. Then dressed only in a muumuu and slippers clomp down the stairs to the grocery store and pick up a six-pack.
It seemed there was a vortex over this city--somewhere behind that anvil of cloud-- hovering. It sucked up all good intentions. It swallowed memory. Nothing remained.
It was time to go. She gathered up her belongings and left the room. Walking past the room full of emergency foods, she said good bye to the receptionist and unlocked the door to the waiting room. There were still people waiting to be heard. An old man, a mother of two whose children argued over the stained Fisher Price telephone and a skinny man, who might be the father, stared out the window bored, bored and worn. They glanced at her as she opened the door, taking in her clothes and hair. The obvious assumption was that she wasn’t there to help them, so they fell back in on themselves into the doldrums of waiting for a can of macaroni and cheese and a bed for the night.
Outside the air was fresher than she expected. Perhaps it was just the sense of having escaped, again, the doom that always hit her when she went into the welfare office, as though a hand was waiting to pull her into that world forever.
She made it to her truck, started it, and began to drive onto the street when there they were. Two men. Two scraggly, dead-eyed, beat up men screaming at each other. One had a baseball bat behind his back. The man with the bat pulled his weapon out and raised it over his head.
She drove her truck onto the sidewalk between them and stopped.
They all just stared at each other and then the men walked away.
She backed up off the sidewalk and drove home. She felt a sudden rush of happiness.
She had made them stop--for a moment.
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