Living alone in an unattractive furnished studio apartment on a summer lease near the university, Angela had little material or spiritual to show from her life. Worse, she was gaining weight, and her acne vulgaris reoccurred then. Pints of ice cream were among the culprits, but she had recently read that zinc supplements would help clear up the skin; she liked her Häagen-Dazs.
She lived off the remains of her recent student loan. How she managed to hold on to it for six months was anyone’s guess.
It was a personal struggle for her to be frugal. She wasted her time drinking Shiner Bocks at Les Amis, buying clothes at Goodwill that she wore once, and tossing on a pile of clothes she procrastinated about washing.
Last night, after some frantic math in a spiral notebook, Angela realized she had enough to cover expenses and rent for another month. She could make it last two months if she genuinely stretched it out, cutting out the beer and ice cream and not buying clothes at the rag shops.
She stared at the pile of clothes in the corner. Then, reaching down, she fingered a shoe strap lying by her feet before tossing it on the stack. The high heel jutted out above an orange wool sweater she regretted picking up, even though it cost only fifty cents.
She bought the shoes at the Wild Pair at Barton Creek Mall and wondered why she was just differently attractive and gaining weight since she didn’t feel sexy in them. She wore them to the Crown and Anchor, along with a sundress, and no one talked to her.
Angela sniffed, wiped her nose with her thumb, and lay back on the sheets, wanting to cry, but instead pushed down her belly. The pale folds of flesh disguised her waist, though strands of pubic hair protruded over the lolling hill of her belly remained in view. Angela pulled up her legs. Veins appeared on her thighs, resembling an art student’s interpretation of Jasper Johns, drunk and pissing in a fireplace.
Angela preferred Rothko—his chronic depression suited her feelings today.
She looked again at her thighs and imagined a road map. The brown freckle close to her knee was Kerrville, she imagined, and she traced the nearby vein back to Austin.
So much had changed in the ten years since she arrived at the university. She was then seventeen, a small-town girl from a goat-roper town, majoring in Fine Arts, and spent much of the time passing quietly through time, making no noise, attracting little attention, and switching her major twice. Ten years, 163 credit hours, and no scrap of paper to prove she was brilliant.
Occasionally, she found work. A used bookstore in North Austin, occasional wait jobs she got fired from after a month—going from one restaurant to another until something terrible happened, such as being late for work too many times, missing shifts entirely, sloppy service. Still, she never got on the lousy restaurant worker list, and if she wanted to, Angela could get another waitress gig somewhere. Austin was becoming a big city, and she felt she was pretty enough on good days.
Though now twenty-seven, youth flaked off her like snakeskin, and Angela grew anxious as she realized she wasn’t a kid and too juvenile to be an adult. Being closer to thirty than eighteen was an epiphany she hated to have. Middle age beckoned with increasing speed, and she could not hold back the hands of life’s clock.
Reminded of this surge of time, she closed her chapped lips and waxed poetic in her mind: lives and loves and drugs, so much for the nuclear bomb to come and blow up this party of Western excess. The macabre hope of atomic war fell as the news talked of Reagan, Gorbachev, Glasnost, Perestroika, and handshakes with reduced tensions and cooperation. Soon there will be no enemies, and she understood that nuclear doom was no longer an excuse to fuck off the remainder of her life.
It pissed her off, too. She wasted time-wasting, thinking all this time the world would end soon. Then, in a flash, a mushroom cloud over the Texas Tower.
Instead, Angela faced the oblivion of service workers living from apartment to houseshares, occasionally developing emotionally furtive with mediocre performance and passion.
Maybe an occasional relationship and she had two, but it ended in a failure that resembled a desiccation rather than a detailed breakup. Otherwise, smoking weed, the Les Amis café and occasional classes at the university or the nearby community college on student loans and Pell Grants provide a meager lifestyle.
Angela never wrote except in her diaries and occasional poems, and she could not sing, so in this town, the only other entertainment she could provide was becoming one of the local crazies, like the woman who sat by the payphones at the Stop’ n Go down the street. Angela would listen to her rants: “I didn’t pay my phone bill eight apartments ago, and now I am living on the street waiting to hear back from number nine.” Silly, ridiculous, but the woman was not much older than her. “
Number nine” was a local legend. Stories swirled about her: she was a debutante in East Texas, an oilman’s daughter, a brilliant scholar who lost her mind while working on her doctorate. Or someone who dropped acid during a ZZ Top concert in the 70s and remained stuck in a haze of melting and undulating whatever.
Angela was more sympathetic, occasionally giving her change and buying her microwave burritos from the convenience store. Angela saw Number Nine as rejected, somehow remembered by someone, family—somewhere; also a face to be occasionally discussed, sometimes sans humor by people who knew her when the woman had a real name.
Even though ridiculed by many, she left a stern warning.
To Angela, Number Nine could be her. The woman at the Stop’ n Go was a myth known only as a number, a face without a persona beyond what only revealed; ultimately, a woman unknown.
Angela pulled up and looked around the studio. She tossed the clothes, now piling up like a grave in the corner.
She noted the television on a tin nightstand against the wall, some old paintings from school leaning beside it, and the shag carpet fading, worn with time and aging slowly.
She stood gracefully on her toes, a relic from her childhood dance days. It seemed every girl in Kerrville wanted to be a ballerina or a cowgirl, but Angela wanted to be an artist instead.
She did ballerina for a few years, enabling her to pick up the telephone receiver off the hook with her foot and walk without sticking her ass out.
Angela got in the shower, palms flat against the peach tile, slowly moving brunette tresses under the hot water. Angela knew two restaurants were looking for a waitress—one would start her in the morning, but if Angela worked her way to nights, she would make up to a hundred a night.
The other restaurant was busier, and Angela would have to start as a bus person.
After her shower, Angela resolved to call them both for interviews and finally got her laundry done. The Laundromat was next to the Stop’ n Go; if Number Nine were there, she would get a burrito and an orange juice. Perhaps talk to her. Treat her like the human being she is and deserves.
While drying her hair, she considered dyeing it blonde again.
Then she remembered encountering a man at Les Amis Café who said the color reminded him of Kansas straw in the autumn.
His name was Martin, and he was in graduate school studying semiotics. They played like puppies that night, and Martin admitted he had a girlfriend in the morning.
Kansas straw blew out with the tumbleweeds.
Invariably, there was always a catch—and a release.
Angela considered changing her major again--and her hair color. Both seemed related.
She called the restaurant that would hire her for the morning shift position and arranged an interview for tomorrow morning.
Angela stared at the pile of clothes and felt overwhelmed. She took a deep breath, realizing there was laundry and then a job to find. No nuclear bomb would ever blow the world away, and fall registration was in six weeks.
about the author
ke Lee's work appears in or is forthcoming in Cafe Lit, Roi Faineant, Wallstrait, BULL, Drunk Monkeys, and many others.
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