The woman watched rain sloosh from rooftops and cleave into arterial streams. Water pooled around the stone plinths and terracotta pots that bracketed La Casa Pasta’s doorway, spreading topsoil and half-buried ornamentals onto the pavement.
My, Pallene said, why does no one fix that?
Because no one can, she answered and
she awakened and could still feel the girl’s damp fingers waggle inside her palm. Her hand was empty and dry, and the left side of her bed was empty and undisturbed, and the rain still fell on Casimiro Avenue. She could hear it splash from slow-moving cars, broad semicircles that flattened on the sidewalk. Pallene is a pretty name, she thought. She may have discovered that name in a newspaper or in a magazine at Hello, Dollies, where she had her hair done every third Thursday afternoon. Hair done. What does that even mean, she thought: shampooed and shaped and perfumed with allegedly and quite possibly European hairspray. And still he did not notice. He just saw the twenty-five dollars deducted from the checking account every month, and actually called it her womanly fun thing. He was probably proud of himself for his acuity, and he probably had no idea of how demeaning it was. Or maybe he did.
Why does no one fix that?
Because no one can, she answered and
she did not go to Hello, Dollies to make herself more desirable for him. She went there to listen to differently-phrased conversations, and the sort of laughter you hear from women when discussing literally anything but their marriage: John Kennedy, Jesus Christ, movie stars, lapsed desires, diminished expectations, dissertations, disappointments, desserts. How could she tell him that, that none of it was about him? He would be bruised and his shoulders would droop like half-buried ornamentals. That image startled her and she thought again, Pallene is such a pretty name. Where have I heard it before?
We can try again, he said. As if that solved everything. You lose a nickel down a sewer grate and you find another one beside a shopping cart. All things evened out. At least you didn’t have to go full term, he said. The nurse turned away. She did not smell like European hairspray at all but of sweaty, bludgeoned hands reaching for mercy, and underneath that stink, simple hospital soap foamed into nothing. We can try again, honey, he said. When you feel better.
Maybe Pallene was nothing important at all, just a word conjured up for a corporate Scrabble board: (n.) an expensive hairspray that promotes unrealistic expectations of beauty, possible European. See also: hair done (v). the act of becoming beautiful and ephemeral.
Or something less that that. Something fleeting, like rain that can only exist in a dream.