|
|
The Last Fight
By
Susan Miller Silva, Oct 24, 2008
The last fight we had was about time travel, of all things. Right there in the back deck of Harrigan’s,
surrounded by my students.
“You’re being obstreper...o’stinate,” she said and tossed her head in a way she probably thought was coquettish
but that only managed to show her frizzy, gray roots. “You know it’s true. I’m traveling through time right
now. I’m getting younger.” She leaned over us and flattened her palms on the table. The late afternoon sun
caught every hair on her face. Which, as recently as a few months ago, I would have called “downy.”
Billie suddenly was interested in joining me again when I went out, probably only because she thought I was
sleeping with one of my students. Earlier that day I had told her, “If I were having an affair, it wouldn’t be
with one of those vacuous adolescents.” Granted, not the most reassuring comment.
She parroted my words back at me. “Having an affair? What kind of way is that to talk? What are you, stuck in the
1950s? What are you Graham fucking Greene?” She knew I hated being criticized for word choice, ever.
She narrowed her eyes at me then as if she could peer into every corner of my soul. But I doubt she could see
Irini there. She’d never imagine me with that type, Irini in her nubby wool suit with braided trim, Irini with
her electric curlers and makeup kit that looked like a little suitcase. So strange, these Russian women who
dressed and acted twenty years older than they were. Talk about time travel, they were stuck in the 70s, or maybe
the 80s. Whatever decade the American TV shows came from that they had studied.
Now Billie flung her long scarf over her shoulder and lurched away from the table. “I’m going to the bathroom,”
she announced. She took a few tentative steps and the scarf dragged through a puddle on the table. One of the
boys stood up to help her.
At my left elbow, a sophomore girl downed her third beer with the determination of someone gulping barium for a
medical test. “I think it’s just terrible,” she started, and I looked everywhere but straight in her face. “When
married people aren’t soulmates, I mean.” If I could have time-traveled right then, I would have hustled back to
five minutes before I first used that expression on Billie.
Twenty minutes later she came back to the table and stood behind me, laughing extravagantly at everything the boy
murmured. I craned my neck around and saw it was the baseball player from my Thursday seminar. He didn’t care
about her. He didn’t care about Seventeenth Century British Poetry. Billie’s face was red from drinking or maybe
a hot flash. “It’s not scientifically possible!” I bellowed.
Later I told Irini, “That was our last fight.” She sat on the edge of the bed, slithering out of panty hose. What
woman wore panty hose anymore?
She said, “Do you mean ‘last’ as in ‘final’ or just ‘most recent’?”
Susan Miller Silva has worked as an editor, Internet project manager, trainer, and interviewer, despite having
been told once that the best job she could get would be proofreading tuna fish labels. Other work has appeared in
Dark Sky and Song. She lives in San Francisco.
Back
|
