Angela on the Road
The roads are like arteries that bring things stranger than death through this town. You learn that from the traffic report. Like tonight I was on my way home from work and the radio said there was a filing cabinet in the fast lane on the freeway where I had just been. As if someone had come along right behind me and dropped it there. As if it could have hit my roof instead of the road, and rained the paper of someone else’s life all over me. I wonder if the drawers fell open, and what was lost, and to whom.
Now I am lying in my bed listening to the cars at the stop sign in front of my apartment, and I mean it is right in front of my window and I am listening to the predictable slow and start of their motors—just enough to keep me from falling asleep until they stop going home. They drive like they don’t care who they are waking up or bothering or polluting into cancer. Their monster engines rev hungrily and they are gone.
On my way to work in the morning the traffic report warns of a ladder on the on-ramp to the 110 that has caused a single-car accident. My coffee spills and I remember my horoscope saying something about Mercury’s Revenge. It looks like it will rain, but of course it won’t. It never does in the Valley this time of year, even when it wants to.
I work at an office in San Marino, the only city I’ve ever been in that still has an active branch of the National Charity League with debutante balls. The women who come into my office want their daughters to be star soccer players, yes, but also to win the Miss La Cañada Flintridge contest. It is not a Beauty Pageant, they say, but an Excellence Contest. They come in with their sprayed hair and expectant eyes and look at me like I have the golden key. I hand them slips of paper with dates and phone numbers and information and they get all excited and forget my name when they leave. When they come back they will look at me in shock and disbelief at their memory loss and apologize and ask me my name. They will blame it on their age. Next time they will ask someone in the hall before they come in so they don’t have to ask me.
At work today my boss is smiling more than usual and I think she may have finally come out of her tightly buttoned jacket just long enough to get laid. I shouldn’t talk, but I don’t wear jackets when its 80 degrees out. I hear her on the phone and a few minutes later a new orchid arrangement arrives. The deliveryman’s nametag flashes weakly in the fluorescent lights. He puts it on the table by the door where I can stare at it all day long. I hate orchids. I swear to myself that if I have to spend the next week staring at these orchids I will quit. He smiles politely and leaves the door open behind him. I get up to close it and realize I don’t know his name.
I leave work a little early. On my way home the radio says there is a rooster swerving in and out of the fast lane on the 105. If I were on the 105 I would be closer to home.
In my living room by the window I am trying to read. I live across from a high school and on dance nights it gets so loud. People yell and screech and squeal tire wheels and say “nigger.” I go outside and push things around on the porch. After it quiets down I pour myself a glass of wine to help me sleep. I look out the kitchen window and see Mr. Who deeply hunched over a garbage can gently easing it back into its place in the alley. He is about eighty-five and wears his trousers up around his ears. He lives alone, one presumes, because his shirts are all stained. He pets other people’s dogs and sweeps other people’s sidewalks and puts other people’s trash out on trash day. Nobody knows his name, but he always smiles and waves. When he turns his back I wonder how much longer he’ll be around.
Through the front door I can hear a man across the street. He is shouting into his phone and his voice echoes through his kitchen. He is telling someone to stop yelling, to stop being mad, that it doesn’t get them anywhere. I look out at him and he turns away, like he doesn’t think I can hear. When he lowers his voice I stop moving and quiet my breath. I don’t mean to listen in but he could just close his window. He is saying, “Sorry, sorry.”
On my way to work the next morning there is a couch on the on-ramp to the 10 and it takes forever to get it cleared away. The radio says there is a couple in the slow lane of the 5 Northbound. It says they are wandering in and out of lanes because they are arguing. I want to call and ask them if they ever make this stuff up just for kicks.
The traffic reporters refer to all the freeways with the definite article. I do too; I say ‘the 10’ and ‘the 5’ because everyone else does. But once I called a hotel in San Francisco for driving directions and a man with a sibilant ‘s’ made fun of me.
“You’re coming from what? Oh, fiiive. You must be from LA,” he said.
“I’m not from LA; I’m just driving from LA.”
“Well you’re obviously not from around here either,” he said, “We would never say ‘the 5.’ It’s I-5, not ‘the 5.’”
I told him I didn’t think it mattered much what we called the freeway. I wanted to tell him “say 5 one more time, asshole,” and instead thanked him very much.
My boss keeps her door closed most of the day. The orchid arrangement is gone, and when she sticks her head out to ask for a memo on the Rose Parade she is smiling cheerfully. The women with perfect toenails come in with their daughters. The girls look at me forlornly while their mothers are on their cell phones waiting for the door to open. One gnaws on her fingernails and stares at me with sad, empty eyes. When I ask if I can help her she says no politely, in a voice too soft for her age. When they go in her long chestnut hair swings behind her, silky rainfall. She looks back over her shoulder and smiles weakly. I try to forget the three gray hairs I pulled out of my head last night. They close the door behind them and the mother and my boss laugh loudly.
My boss asks me to stay late to finish the packets for tomorrow’s auditions. I spend the hours of six to eight o’clock stuffing envelopes. I get two paper cuts and drink three Diet Cokes before I finish and lock up.
On my way home the radio says there is a baby carriage on the 110, a dog on the 605, and a two-car collision on the 405. There is always a two-car collision on the 405.
It is dark and the people around me are beginning to get aggressive. It is as if werewolves came out of them in the moonlight. They swoop in and out of lanes like ravens. As I’m getting off the freeway, exiting on a single lane off-ramp, a homeless man steps into traffic waving his sign. A woman in an enormous truck is spooked by his face and swings around and in front of me. She almost hits a car in front of her and slams on her brakes. The poor guy probably couldn’t get to her even if he wanted to, she is so high off the ground, so armored. I consider writing her an angry sign with the marker I have in my bag but I don’t have enough hands. I breathe and try not to hate her and all the others just like her. I change lanes slowly as the radio broadcasts the last traffic report of the night.
The announcer’s voice comes on.
“There is an unusual single-car injury crash in Westwood, blocking lanes on the eastbound side…” It’s not far from where I live and neither am I—I can see the flashing lights on the road up ahead. I can’t help but slow down as I pass the melée. The lights reflect in the puddles of rain and oil on the road and everything is bright and red. There is a man lying on the sidewalk, crumpled and strange, and another standing, barking at the paramedics. The car behind me honks and he looks toward us. All I can see is hunched shoulders, and rain.
An hour later I am on my porch with a glass of wine and the traffic is calming down. A boy and his girlfriend are walking on the sidewalk. He is tapping her behind and she is saying, “No, no.” He keeps doing it and laughing and they yell and it’s hard to tell if it is for real or for show. My neighbor Jennifer leans out her window and waves. She is wearing a silky bathrobe and has a peel mask on her face. She is a massage therapist⁄actress who jumps on a trampoline in the courtyard and drinks bourbon on the rocks. She is good friends with everyone and gives them all good deals on massages. She tells me she’ll give me a deal too but I’m not really into that.
On the other side of the apartment, Gary the manager is in the courtyard, walking slowly toward his apartment, holding his coat in his hand. He is a stand up comedian who does gigs on cruise liners and is usually out of town. I remember that it is the second and scrawl out the rent check to take to him. Standing in his doorway I can see him slumped in a chair. He speaks slowly without raising his eyes, and doesn’t crack any jokes about the owner or the President. He asks me to leave the check on the table by the door. He says he should go to work tomorrow but can’t for family reasons. I didn’t know he had family.
I go back to my apartment and pack up the trash to take out back. On my way I see Gary again. He is walking to Jennifer’s door. She has taken off her mask and lets him in. He sits down in her front room. I can hear them through the window. She asks him what’s wrong and he says he had a strange accident happen to him tonight, that he hit someone just over the hill on the eight-lane road out of Westwood, that he thinks he might have killed him.
“They kept telling me it wasn’t my fault,” he says. “They all kept saying that, over and over.”
Jen says, “I’m sure it wasn’t,” and gets up to get him a beer.
“There must have been something I could have done, but I didn’t even see him in time to stop.”
“God,” says Jen, “I can’t even imagine.” She hands him his drink and sits down.
In the shadow of a tree, I hold still. I quiet my breath. I don’t want to listen but I can’t just ask him to tell me what happened. He tells her the man was old, at least in his seventies. He was waiting for the bus with about four other people at a stop on the road curving away from the university. The other people at the bus stop said he got fed up, and though he was groggy, he was absolutely determined to cross the street. They said they tried to stop him. One car swerved out of the way and went up on the meridian. Gary was in the middle lane trying to understand what the car was avoiding when the man appeared out of nowhere in his headlights. He was dressed all in black, impossible to see until he was right in his front of him. As soon as he tried to react and stepped on the brakes, he hit him. The man hit the windshield and went flying through the air onto the pavement ahead. He was incoherent when Gary got to him, his head bleeding, his legs sprawled. His hips were turned to the side in an unnatural way .
Gary was already dialing as he got out of the car. They told him to wait, that the ambulance would be there in 45 minutes, that they should not move, despite the fact that they were within view of two enormous hospitals. Twenty minutes passed, then thirty. He called again. The attendant on the phone told them to stay put, to wait for the right crew to take him to the right place. When they finally came, Gary had been holding the man’s head, talking softly to him for over an hour. Gary watched the doors to the ambulance close and swore to himself never to go looking for him. He does not know if the man survived.
“He was unconscious, and then he looked at me with these wide eyes. He told me his name. He asked me if he would be alright.” Gary rubs his temples, is waving his hand in the air. “If he died tonight, if he dies in three weeks, I don’t want to know. I have to live with the ambiguity. At least this way, in my mind, he has a chance to live.”
“What was his name?” Jen asks.
“God, I was so fucked up, I don’t remember.”
I go quietly back into my apartment and put the recycling out on the porch. I flip through greeting cards with flowers on them and try to find the right thing to give Gary a sign. I find some letterhead from work and start to write him a note. “I hope you feel better Gary…” Then what? “Shit happens, drive safe?” I ball it up and throw it on the pile of papers and cans.
I take the containers out back. Gary is still at Jen’s house. Now she’s talking about the parallel universe, and the divine paradox of happenstance. Gary is shifting his glass from hand to hand, shaking his head, staring with wide eyes. As I walk away her voice turns to a drone. I can’t shake the look of him staring, shifting that glass, the condensation clinging to his hands, his face numb.
Mr. Who is in the courtyard, setting a sprinkler out on the grass. He drags the hose carefully into place and adjusts it a few times. While I set out the recycling, he turns on the faucet. As I walk back I see him at the edge of the grass with one hand out, testing the stream.
That night I have a dream. I am driving on the freeway to work, listening to the radio. Suddenly an old woman appears in front of my car. She has wild gray hair and a loose sweater and when she looks at me it is with my eyes. Her eyes bore into me, and the moment she is standing there, time slows to a stop. Before I can do anything she has blocked my view, because I have hit her. She is on the roof and then she has flown off. I know she is dead. I want to stop my car but I can’t and I wake up gasping. My hand is in the air, reaching for the knob like I’m looking for the traffic report.
The next morning at eight it is already a scorcher and the steering wheel is almost too hot to touch.
Otium
