Something I wrote last November. It got rejected when I sent it out to get published, so I may as well post it here.
Routes and Schedules
By Jamil Ragland
March 20th
Today’s the first day of spring. Well, it hasn’t technically been a day yet, since spring didn’t start until 7:00, so we’re only about three hours into it. And it was only 38 degrees today. Better, but not much.
Winter used to be my favorite season. Every kid loves going to sleep knowing that a snowstorm is coming overnight. You hope that the next time you open your eyes, the window sill will be piled up with fluffy whiteness. The more snow you saw, the better you felt. It meant that the day was yours: no tests, no teachers, just a date between you and the snow.
Now, the more snow I see, the worse I feel, because that’s just more work to do. Once you’re an adult, the world doesn’t stop for snow. Hell, it barely slows down. Shovel the driveway, clean the car, trudge through that sloppy gray mush on the streets with morons cutting each other off, just to get to work to do more trudging and deal with more morons. Winter seems to bring the worst out in people too. At least in summer or fall, people will give you a nod or a smile on the street. In winter, they just brush by, on their way to whatever’s so important. Jake says that it’s too cold for pleasantries in February. Cold weather or not, people can at least be polite.
Maybe that’s why Pam is acting the way she is. She’s never been a winter person, cold weather makes her grouchy. It would explain why her lawyers are calling me every other day.
March 22nd
I know I’m not supposed to skip days, but there was nothing to talk about. Just another overcast day. The sun hasn’t appeared since the weekend, so the snow sits there in mountains on the curb, iced over and glistening like white onyx. It’s hard for people to climb over that and get onto the bus, but the plowers doesn’t think about the buses apparently, only the cars. Which is stupid, since we’re all part of the same department.
There’s a woman that rides my bus every day, and she has trouble with those snow banks. She’s gotta be in her 60’s, your standard little old lady. She always wears a red and white checkered kerchief over her hair, and she has this brown leather jacket that looks older than I am. She always says hello when she gets on the bus, and her face is so round and sweet. She looks like someone’s old Italian grandmother, hook nose and all.
It’s the same routine every day. At 8:40 in the morning, I pick her up at the corner of Albany Ave and Vine Street, heading towards downtown. I drop her off in front of the Athenaeum. Then at 2:15 in the afternoon, I pick her up in the same place, and drop her back off at the same corner. Every weekday, no matter what, she’s there, ever since I started my run on the Q bus route. We never speak beyond hello, but still, I feel some kind of connection with her. Our quarterly rotation is coming up in April, and they’ll probably put me somewhere in the south end of the city. I’m going to miss her.
March 23rd
Sometimes I wish I didn’t have a fucking cell phone. All I do with it lately is ignore calls from my wife’s lawyer. And every time I pick it up, it’s them asking for another concession. I’m sick and tired of this. When I agreed to the divorce, Pam promised me that she would make it as quick and painless as possible. She said she didn’t want to hurt me anymore than she already had. Something about loving me, but not being in love with me. What bull****. It sounded like she’d ripped that straight from some movie. Or maybe her boyfriend told her to say it, I don’t know.
Now they want me to pay her legal fees. What? SHE asked ME for the divorce, and now I have to pay for the whole thing? No, wait, they did at least offer to go half on the court fees. She probably thinks she’s doing me a favor. She was always like that. Jake said I should say no, because if I give in again, then they’re going to ask for something again. At this point though, I don’t care. If paying for the whole divorce will end this thing, I’m more than happy to do so. I really don’t fucking care anymore.
March 24th
Do I have to address you? Do I have to give you a name? No, I’m a 37-year-old man, not some teenage girl in white and pink tube socks writing in her diary about how the captain of the football team smiled at her today.
I know I said that I was going to miss that little old lady when I switch routes, and I really am. But I was thinking, maybe it will be for the best. We just got our new routes, they take effect April 3rd. I’m being moved to the K route, Park Street through North Main Street. By then, hopefully my divorce will be finalized, and I can make a clean start in everything.
It’s Friday night. I still haven’t gotten used to being alone on the weekends. What am I supposed to do? Jake invited me out to a bar tonight, but I said no. He’s still a young man, he’s only 29. What the hell am I going to do at a bar? Especially since this is Spring Break week, and all those little college girls with their tight bodies and fake IDs will be roaming the city. That’s the last thing I need, to try hitting on a drunk twenty-something with a group of her friends egging her on. I haven’t been out of the game so long that I don’t remember that packs of single girls are more ravenous and vicious than a pack of wolves. Wolves tear you apart to survive; women do it for fun.
March 25th
It’s only 3:38 PM, but I’m so bored I just decided to write something. I hate Saturdays. I always have but now I really do. I actually miss work on days like this. People always ask me if I get bored driving around in circles for hours. To their surprise, and mine actually, I tell them that I don’t. Every time I pass by a place, I notice something new about it. When I went down Vine Street yesterday, I saw that there was a fire hydrant between Capen and Mansfield. It sounds pathetic, but those little things make it bearable. It’s like a game that I play with myself: what can I find today that I didn’t see yesterday? Pam never understood that. She was always so negative. It’s not new, you just weren’t paying attention before, she would say. She was right, in a sense.
But it’s the same with people. Every day their stories change, overnight. A death in the family, kids graduating, the pet escapes. I never realized how much things could change in one day until it happened to me. I was happily married one day, and the next I wasn’t. Just like that. It’s also funny how much you can learn about a person when you spend twenty minutes a day with them, and how you can know so little about your own wife.
I’m just down because I’m bored. At least on Sundays I can watch basketball all day. I’m just counting the seconds, minutes and hours until this day is over. There is one thing I like about Saturdays, the lawyer’s office is closed. Whatever, I’m just going to take a nap.
6:01 PM
Is that how I do this if I write twice in the same day? Fuck it. I’m so angry I feel like my chest is about to explode. I learned something today. Her lawyers ARE open on Saturdays. Not ten minutes after I shut my eyes, the phone rang. It was that bloodsucker McCarthy. He wants to know if we can renegotiate the terms of the divorce before the big day. No can do, I said. I already got March 31st off for the court date, I can’t take any more days off between now and then. How about today, he says. My lawyer is sane, I answer. He takes the weekends off. I don’t remember exactly what we said to each other after that, but the jist of it was the we could either come to an agreement now or in court, and that it was quite easy for a settlement date to turn into a trial date.
He threatened me! HE THREATENED ME. Now they want me to pay off her car note too. They already got me to agree to the credit card debt and the lawyer fees. And every time I call them out for putting the screws to me, they always say, “But you get to keep the house!” The house isn’t paid off either! Pam walks away scot free, and dumps all of the old bills on me. I didn’t get a prenup because I didn’t have any money when we got married. I wish I did now. Her boyfriend better be paying attention.
I can still remember when I met Pam. Pamela Ward. She was only 23, right out of Quinnipiac with a degree in accounting, working in my parents’ bakery as the bookkeeper. She fit in perfectly there: short, round and doughy, just like the cupcakes they sold. I used to actually call her cupcake, back when I was trying to impress her. She was always nice and polite, but she had that “Is this guy serious?” look on her face every time I talked to her. That baffled me, how she thought she had leverage over me, even then. I’ve never been a lady killer, but I’m a tall, well built, blond-hair-blue-eyes type. I’m over a foot taller than she is, and she was even fatter back then. It grossed me out at first, but somewhere during my visits to see my parents her fatness became endearing, sexy even. It didn’t take my parents long to see how much I liked her, and they encouraged me to ask her out. They probably hoped she’d be a good influence on me, maybe even talk me into going back to college. I wasn’t driving buses back then, and they were worried about me.
Ten years later, and their still worried about me, for different reasons of course. What am I going to do? Am I going to have a different girlfriend to bring to their house for holidays? My parents have been married for forty six fucking years. How can I show up in front of them, divorced? My marriage barely lasted seven. They say it’s a different time. My father says people get married and divorced nowadays like they’re changing underwear. I know they’re talking about Pam, but it applies to me too. I’m part of those divorce statistics that everyone shakes their heads at. If I ever get married again, will I be able to day, “Till death do us part” with a straight face?
Fucking lawyer’s got me all over the place. I need to stop being so dramatic and worry about getting through this divorce with more than just the shirt on my back.
March 26th
Celtics won, Knicks lost, did housework all day. If this is going to be mine, I might as well fix it up. I’m exhausted, heading to bed early tonight.
March 27th
Snow. Fucking snow again. I haven’t watched the news in days, and I wake up to six inches of it. It’s almost April goddamn it, I already put the rock salt and shovels in the tool shed. I’m going to have a hell of a time getting through the backyard to get to them, if the damn thing isn’t frozen shut. This is my first time writing in the morning, but I’m just so pissed off that I had to. I didn’t even set the alarm clock to give myself time to shovel the driveway. Shit. Shit shit shit.
10:02 PM
I can’t believe the day I had. I miraculously made it to work on time, but everything from there was a disaster. You’d think that people living in New England would know to take it easy in the snow. Well, you’d be wrong. I drove by no less than twelve different accidents today, just on my route alone. And all day my cell phone was ringing, either my lawyer or my wife’s lawyer making proposals and counterproposals. By the time I would agree with one, the other would call me to tell me that they’d changed their minds. Between the terrible roads, the terrible drivers and the terrible lawyers, I fell almost an hour behind my schedule. Eventually I told them to work it out amongst themselves, I was busy. I shut my phone off.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. Oh no, that happened around 3:00. I was late pulling up in front of the Athenaeum, and I could see that little old lady huddled up, trying to protect herself against the wind that whistled it was so fierce. I apologized to her again and again, and she just nodded and smiled. I felt terrible for making her wait.
The rest of the ride was normal, until we stopped at the corner of Albany and Vine. The plowers had stacked the snow in massive piles on the curb like always. A young guy jumped out onto one of the piles, knocking snow into the area that had been cleared for people getting off the bus. He was wearing a black Orioles cap, one of those black flight jackets and big, dark blue jeans. I’ll never forget what he was wearing.
The woman got out after him. She turned back and smiled at me, and then everything slowed down. I’ve seen those corny disaster shows, where they zoom in on some grieving widows face and they talk about how the accident that took their spouse occurred in slow motion. I never believed them until today. I could see her foot touch what she thought was the ground, but instead it was a piece of ice that had been knocked off the snow bank. She stumbled down the last stair and hit her right hip on the concrete sidewalk. The cracking noise wasn’t what I expected. It sounded like someone twisting bubble wrap, fast and hard. No one on the bus moved, even though we had all seen it. It was too surreal.
The only person who reacted was the man who’d gotten off the bus. And he laughed. Not a stifled giggle, but the hysterical belly laughter you’d expect if this had been some kind of gag. “Yo son, this old lady just busted her ass!” he said into his phone. By then half the passengers were around the old woman, and she was screaming words that I’d never heard before. I realized then why we had never spoken beyond hello. It was because she couldn’t. She wasn’t an old Italian lady, she was an old Spanish lady, and couldn’t speak a lick of English.
I also heard some of the passengers talking to the man. They called him a punk, a bastard, and every other name in the book. He just smirked and stuck out his middle finger at the entire group before going on his way. An RN who rode the bus said she was pretty sure that the old woman had broken her hip. She said not to move her, only lift her enough to put some jackets between her and the frozen concrete. We waited until the ambulance arrived. They took turns talking to her, but I sat in my chair at the wheel, my head in my hands. I didn’t even know the woman’s name, but I was crying. I still don’t know why.
I hope she’s okay.
March 28th
I drove by Vine and Albany at 8:40 on the dot this morning. She wasn’t there. I guess that’s to be expected, but I was still devastated. I told Jake about the whole thing at the depot before we left. He had a matter-of-fact response, as usual. People are jerks.
It was Jake that gave me this journal. Before he got divorced, he went to see a marriage counselor. The counselor said that he and his wife should write down their feelings every day, and then read select passages to each other when they went in for counseling. In his words, it only “accelerated the deterioration of their relationship”. Here, I might as well save you $2,000 bucks on post-divorce counseling, he’d said when he handed it to me. It was a great looking book, orange with brown tracings on the cover and a brown spine. When I opened it, several pages were ripped out, and on the inside cover it read “Jake’s Journal” except Jake had been crossed out and replaced with “Dennis’s”. I couldn’t help but laugh. That was just like him.
Jake’s a strange guy in general though. He graduated top of his class from Kingswood-Oxford, did his undergrad work at Wesleyan, got his Masters in some super-complicated math field at MIT, and married a gorgeous Asian woman, all by the time he was 26. Not bad for someone who’s dad was a security guard at Pratt and Whitney. But now, three years later, he’s divorced and driving buses. Whenever I ask him what happened, he always gives me the same cryptic response: You can’t have facial hair and be a scientist. I asked him what the hell that means, and he just looked at me. He said it with such a straight face that I almost believed him. What about Einstein, I say. That’s a moustache, it doesn’t count. Well what about your wife? She doesn’t like facial hair either, he says. That’s a lot to lose for a scruffy neckbeard, but Jake has his real reasons I’m sure. He always tells it like it is, just not about himself.
Pam’s boyfriend actually looks a lot like Jake. They’re both average height, both bald, by choice oddly enough, and they’re both black. Jake had a field day with me when I told him I was thinking about asking Pam to reconcile. Forget it man, she’s crossed over to the Dark Side. He really cracked himself up with that one. And of course there was the inevitable “Once you go black you never go back”. I had to come up with a response on the spot: Once you go Asian, don’t start complainin’. That was probably the best one-liner of my life.
It was just Jake’s way of telling me what I already knew: there was no going back. She'd introduced him to me as a coworker, and asked if she could go out for drinks with him to discuss the books of the company they were both hired by. One year later, almost to the day, she asked for the divorce. I never blamed him. He didn’t seem to have much more money than me, and although he wasn’t ugly, I knew I was better looking. Basically, he didn’t steal Pam. Pam left me.
My parents said that was a very enlightened attitude I had, and that’s the problem. I’ve always taken crap well. As much as I wanted to curse out that kid that who let that old lady fall, I didn’t. As angry as I am about Pam’s lawyers and their latest demands, I’m going to give in. As many times as I’ve wanted to call Pam the fat, selfish, lying whore that she is, I haven’t. I mean, it wouldn’t reflect well on me to call her that anyway, would it? I did marry her.
Man, it’s already 11:30. I’ve only got two days left as a married man. Time to start planning my crazy bachelor life.
March 29th
I overheard the RN that rides my bus today. She was telling another passenger that the old lady that fell on Monday was admitted to the hospital she works at, and that she died last night. Something about complications from her hip fracture, an infection or something. I knew that it was a big deal for an old person to break their hip, but I didn’t know they could die from it. I really don’t know what else to say.
I can’t wait to get off the fucking Q line.
March 30th
Pam won’t let me rest, not even in my sleep. I had a dream about her last night. It was June 7th, 1998. Our first date. I knew that she was a big fan of flowers from our conversations at the bakery, so I took her to the arboretum at Elizabeth Park. He walked down the cobblestone path, twisting through rows of tulips and daisies. We were holding hands, laughing and talking the way we used to. We came to a row of sunflowers, some of them as tall as me. I swear, when she smiled, the sunflowers turned towards her, just to be nearer.
At the end of the path we came to a clearing. The cobblestones formed a ring around an old colonial-style gazebo. It had a fresh coat of white paint, and a green shingled roof. The weathervane, a rooster, had been polished to perfection, glinting in the sunlight. Between the gazebo and the circular path were waves of a flower I’d never seen before. The stem had four leaves protruding outward, and the flower at the top changed color with the breeze. It was indigo in northerly winds, crimson when it blew south, goldenrod in the east and cyan in the west. I’ve never seen anything so lovely, except for Pam. Her cheeks were flush, and her hair was done in the cute French braid she used to always wear. She was her old chubby self, the way she was when I fell in love with her. We walked towards the gazebo, hand in hand, but the alarm clock snapped me awake before we reached it.
The date. God, I can’t believe I still remembered the date. I still remember the first time we made love. I’d never been with a woman as large as Pam, and even though I wanted her, I held my breath because I expected her body to be sweaty before we even started. I almost passed out. Stupid idea to not breathe while having sex. When I finally gasped for air, my lungs filled with a buttery, sweet scent. The bakery. It made me want her even more. I found myself thinking about our lovemaking constantly. Sex had always been a “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” thing to me before, even when I was in relationships. I still remember that date, that scent, because I felt for the first time the love in lovemaking. I wanted to feel every part of her body, every fold of skin. I was addicted to her. She worked for my parents until they closed the shop two years ago. When she stopped smelling like the bakery, that’s when the problems began.
Damn it, I’m exhausted. At night, I think about this shit, and during the day I can’t get that old woman out of my head. It’s like I feel guilty for both of them. If I’d done more to make my wife happy, this wouldn’t be happening. If I’d helped that lady down the stairs, she wouldn’t have died. Right now, Jake would probably say one of his favorite lines: “If” is a masochist’s favorite word. He’s right. Jake is always right. This will all be over by this time tomorrow anyway. I need to rest.
March 31st
Would you believe that I’ve never been in a courthouse before? I always paid my speeding tickets by mail, and that’s the most trouble I’ve ever been in. On TV, you always see these grand wooden benches and doors with brass knobs that lead into huge, stadium-like rooms. I’m sitting in the hallway now, waiting for Pam and her lawyers to show up. This place is nothing like TV. The halls are narrow and cramped, and everyone in here, from the rent-a-cops to the lawyers and public defenders, looks like they work too many hours for not enough pay. There are benches out here, but they’re made of some kind of cheap plywood or something. I haven’t been in the courtroom yet, but I’m guessing it’s pretty underwhelming too.
Richard, my lawyer, is sitting next to me. I bet he’s wondering what I’m writing, but he’s too polite to ask. I should have gotten a real hardass for a lawyer, then maybe I wouldn’t be getting ripped off by Pam. Then again, he would ask me what I’m writing. It’s a tradeoff, I guess. I’m surprised myself that I have this journal with me. It does make things a little bit easier. Plus it’s less crazy to talk to yourself in writing than it is to do it out loud. That’s probably why people address their journals as “you”, or give them names. That way it seems it seems like you’re talking to someone besides yourself.
Fine, I’ll play along. From now on, you’re Jake Jr. Jake Sr. will get a real kick out of that.
8:04 PM
It’s over. I am officially a free man. After the judge hit the gavel, the first thing I thought was, that’s it? With all of the ceremony that the marriage gets, the divorce seems pretty anti-climactic, especially for breaking what’s supposed to be a lifelong commitment.
Pam looked great. She looked like she’s lost about twenty pounds since we stopped living together. Her hair was loose and curled, and she had on a slick gray pants suit. She never had to wear anything that formal at the bakery, but working for corporations is way different than working for Mr. and Mrs. Stanton. I’m happy for her, I guess. She looks really good, and I could see the relief on her face once we were done. We talked for a minute afterward. She told me she had broken up with James, that’s the black guy’s name, and that she was going to stay single for a bit. I lied and said that I’d been seeing a woman for two months. I don’t know why, but it felt good to know that she was alone. That probably makes me a bad person, but whatever. And as much of a physical improvement as the new Pam is, she’s not my Pam. That’s what Jake was telling me that day.
On my way out of the courthouse, I saw a stenographer looking back at me after she passed me in the hallway. Despite everything that’s happened, it didn’t click to me that I could have said something to her until after I was in my car. It’s still going to be a while until I’m used to being single. Oh well, I’m better off. That woman is probably like a vulture, circling overhead as the weak stumble through the courthouse, waiting until they’ve collapsed to pick off of the carcass. I don’t need that now.
So it’s Friday night again, and I’ve got nothing to do. I’m actually fine with that. It’s been a long week, and I need the weekend to just vegetate. No friends, no writing even. I don’t know, I just feel empty inside right now. After I start my new route on Monday, I’ll have something good to write about hopefully. Until then, goodnight.
April 3rd
I hate my new route. Fuck. I’m too tired to write.