Bernice has slipped into a long-forgotten memory. In it she is a recently married, newly employed, 21-year-old American. She is trying to see through a frosty car window. In this memory she has just been told that her birthday present is at the end of the walkway outside of her passenger side window. Bernice wipes away condensation with the palm of a tiny hand inside of a light blue mitten. Outside of the car’s window a curtain of big snowflakes falls between her and her first home as a wife.
Her husband Gerald is behind the wheel beside her. He is leaning back, with one long arm out across the top of the car’s one long front seat. He is all barrel chest and clean shaven with the squarest of jaw. His hand is playing in Bernice’s thick, blonde hair, twirling a curl around and around his thick finger. He is smiling at Bernice’s reaction to his big surprise while Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” whispers out of the car’s AM/FM radio.
Bernice loved every moment with Gerald.
The two started off that year in new jobs on the assembly line at a cigarette company and a cramped, three room, walkup apartment. Just the two of them above a bakery, with iffy radiators and loud neighbors. The few rooms meant that Bernice could always see her husband when the two of them were home. Bernice still can’t help thinking if Gerald whenever she smells baking bread.
Then at the end of that same year Gerald got approved for a mortgage.
Homeownership; the dream of all good Americans. A sentiment wholly excepted by Gerald and Bernice. A lesson heavily enforced every day by her and Gerald’s immigrant parents. He and Bernice had that in common, supportive parents with a clear understanding of how to live, even if they lived short lives. Both Bernice and Gerald had been taught that hard work and clean living was all any American would ever need to prosper.
In Bernice’s memory winter air cuts across her forehead, bouncing her unruly blond curls as she cranks the window handle. The task takes both of her little hands. The sudden cold feels right on her heart shaped face. Her wide eyes are wide open, shocked, still not believing until she can see the front door of it. Still not believing that this could be her life. The wind outside the car shifts and big snowflakes ride the breeze through her window to melt in the tears on her clear, pink cheeks. Her small hands instinctively clutch at the half inch of gold cross she always wears. Bernice prays a silent ‘Thank you Jesus’ for her husband Gerald. On that day the world is as God meant it to be.
A duck honks.
The sound yanks Bernice back to the present. She looks around as a person does when awaking suddenly in a public place.
Bernice instinctively clutches at her throat for the tiny cross that she had pawned a year ago. All she finds is a wattle of loose neck skin that doesn’t fit her reminiscing. She snatches her hand away.
The retreating memory dulls as it moves further away into the past. Bernice struggles to remember what perfect thing her husband of 40 years had said next, but the memory is going and gone. Bernice struggled to remember more and often lately.
She is back on the park bench that she has thought of as her own for over a month now.
She sits alone holding a single serving package of stale saltine crackers. There are two broken crackers left in the square of clear plastic.
Bernice looks at the crackers in her hand and wonders why she is holding them. What is she doing with the crackers in her hand, she wonders. She wonders at things in her hand more often.
She looks down at the fat duck a few feet away in front of her. The duck stares back of no help. She looks around at the short grass that is frosted with a layer of duck droppings. No clues there. She looks up at the one tree above her park bench. A shard of blinding sunlight breaks through the still leaves. She adjusts her battered, found wig so that it sits more on her wrinkled forehead to block out what rays might reach her tired eyes.
A late fall heatwave is lingering on the city. Bernice barely notices the heat. She ignores the pens and needles from her giant purse’s weight cutting off the circulation to her spindly legs. Her butt had long since fallen numb. She is staring across the duck pond to the small island in its center where most of the city park’s ducks hide from the mid ninety-degree heat, under three young pine trees and a cluster of yellow flowering shrubs.
The fat duck in front of Bernice honks again. His gaze is all for the crackers in her hand. She levels a murderer’s eye at the bird. She remembers what she is doing in the park. Hunting. She looks back to the little island wonders how many eggs there might be hidden in those yellow bushes. Bernice shifts her weight to one side to relieve some of the numbness in her backside thinking about how much she enjoys eating fresh eggs.
A spasm of pain suddenly shoots up her spine from her lower back up to behind her shoulders. She grimaces and sits still a moment. Usually, the sharp twinge would come once, maybe twice, then subside. When it comes again, she reached around, aggravating her stiff, achy shoulder and pokes at her stiff, aching back with stiff, aching fingers. Her swollen knuckles pop as she forces them to bend. Bernice’s hands hurt so often lately.
The duck’s honk is all impatience. With her free hand Bernice pretends to bite a corner of stale cracker and chew it slowly. The duck screams outrage. Bernice smiles crooked dentures and pretends to wipe the crumbs that tumbled from her chest to her filthy dress as the duck watched to see where they might land.
The heat has left the park unnaturally quiet for the lunch hour. Most days the place would be crowded with government workers having a quick bite from one of the food trucks and meal carts that frequented the park. Bernice liked to wait until the state employees sat at her bench, the one closest to the pond, so she could sit down, too close to them, brushing their clean professional clothes with her dirty rags making them get up and move away.
Only, today the park is deserted as far as her old eyes could see. The food trucks and carts are nowhere to be found. Bernice assumes that the street behind her is nearly deserted, too, from the absence of traffic sounds. She didn’t dare look back behind her. Her stiff, skinny neck was years past such rash rotations and also for fear the sight of the federal building across the street would cause her to sweat out of frustration and anger.
The people who had wrecked Bernice’s life worked there. She knew that while everyone else was suffering through a recession the government was bailing out those who caused it. And while good people were getting laid off everywhere the government was still hiring. The machine. It ground bone to dust and moved on without a care.
Bernice watches the fat duck as she opens her big bag. The big zipper rumbled along its track. The ancient leather bag had long used up all its squeaky leather sounds. It slumps open more like doughy slices of bread now. She pulls its wide opening wide open. A black plastic trash bag sits on top. She pulls that out. Underneath is the jumbled remains of all her worldly possessions. Bernice tries to remember where exactly she last saw her last seltzer tablet. Every day she spends more and more time trying to remember.
Bernice reaches into her big purse. She pushes a soy sauce packet, a used bar of soap, a plaid scarf, to one side. A not real gold watch is pushed into a bulging side compartment with a set of six keys to who knows what and a checkbook that she had found wet and dried out.
She pushes her stiff fingers deeper into the leftover jumble of her former life and present situation, no longer sure what belonged to which reality. The seltzer tablet was hiding from her. Bernice hunches over her big bag. She forces her hand in deeper, past the notice of default on the second mortgage to her former home. Past an American flag lapel pen. Her searching fingers pushed down into her big purse, until she is so deep the zipper touches her elbow.
Her fingers poke out through the electrical tape covering a hole at the bottom of her bag. An empty lipstick tube, a folded Polaroid and her last seltzer tablet fall onto her lap. Bernice mimics throwing something towards the fat duck. Its head shoots up in anticipation of something to catch, then down looking around the ground for the missed opportunity.
Bernice smiles as she replaces the black tape at the bottom of her bag. She smooths it into place with her hand. Bernice picks up the seltzer tablet, lipstick tube and photo from the lap of her dirty dress. She checks the lipstick tube, still empty, before she drops it, still empty, back into her bag. She unfolds the Polaroid and is stopped.
The photo shows her and Gerald squinting in the midday sun at one of the hundreds of baseball games he liked to drag her to in their decades of life together. The view was of the two of them standing together on the steps leading to their seats. In the background, far below them and their cheap seats that Gerald had always insisted were the best in the world, was third base. In this photo Bernice held a hotdog with mustard in her left hand and Gerald’s left with her right. She smiled her young smile up at the camera. Gerald smiled down at Bernice.
Bernice have recently began to regret her gripes about having to spend a day at the park watching those stupid men run around in circles. She always pretended to be doing her husband a favor by agreeing to waste a Sunday afternoon in the noise and cold or heat of the park, when the truth was, Bernice couldn’t wait to get to there and to their seats so Gerald could wrap his big arm around her and hold her close for the whole game.
Bernice couldn’t remember the particular day from that Polaroid. All those days so many days back had all blended into one. It was just another remnant from a time when life was a straight path, a path that always led through the three lives of all good Americans.
The first life, before good people were old enough for employment, where an American did their honest best in school, avoided kids with tattoos and long hair, and honor thy father and mother. The second life was after marriage, where all productive citizens woke up early, to arrive on time, to do honest work for an honest pay. And the last life of good American citizens, who had done a good job and attended church regularly. The third life. The one where good people, who’d lived a clean life, paid off their mortgage, paid their taxes and retired to comfort and peace. Bernice was once as sure of that the path leading to comfort and peace as she was sure that Jesus led the faithful to heaven.
It occurred to her that the majority of what she couldn’t remember was from before Gerald got sick.
Bernice stuffed the photo into one of the side pockets of her bag. She ripped the plastic off the two remaining stale crackers. She broke one cracker into four pieces. She tossed one quarter to the fat duck. It snatched it out of the air. She threw another piece closer to her battered sneaker. The third piece she dropped onto the foot beaten dirt in front of her shapeless sneakers.
The fat duck rushed to retrieve it.
The last piece she held over the duck’s eager head. She looked to one side then the other.
Movement on the corner of Bernice’s eye jerked her stiff neck around. A shape moved beyond her vision. She yanked open her open bag and rooted around for her glasses before remembering that they were hung on the buttons on her dress front. When she put them on a girl came into focus. She saunters along the sidewalk beside the small park like she had nowhere to be.
Bernice’s face twisted into an open pit of disgust.
The girl was obnoxiously young. She wore a pair of oversized sunglasses high in her clear, tanned forehead, a short plaid, pleated skirt, a white close fitting, short sleeved dress shirt, a short plaid necktie, white knee socks and all white tennis shoes. Bernice had seen girls in that same outfit walking by often. It was the uniform of the expensive, private school a block over.
The young girl walked with her hands clasped behind her back so her tight shirt strained against its buttons over her small chest. She walked slowly with an exaggerated swing to her narrow hips. With every step her extra short skirt swung away from her narrow hips giving Bernice a sneaking peak at her white underparts.
Bernice turned her head as far around as she dared as the girl went strolling along as if there was no class on a Friday afternoon.
The high school girl turned to look into a car driving towards her. She tracked the car’s path past her, no doubt to see if her little show was being appreciated, Bernice thought. The girl patted at the artfully disheveled hair pinned high atop her head while she licked her bright red painted lips.
Or maybe they weren’t painted, Bernice thought. There was once a time when her own lips were even more naturally bright red than the girl walking by. Though, Bernice never owned a shirt so tight or a skirt that short. No good girl ever would.
“Another ‘One’.” Bernice mumbled.
Bernice often thought of aimless, pointless people as ‘Ones’. As in, the Ones who work for low pay, allowing older, more experienced workers to be forced into early retirement in favor of the One’s slave wages. The godless Ones who live in their dirty neighborhoods pretending not to know what drugs will do to their lives and the lives of everyone around them. The One with pointless tattoos and baggy clothes fouling up the English language. The Ones who sign leases for homes knowing goddamn well they have no intention of paying those bills. The Ones who stare at their phones and bump into old ladies, because they think they deserve everything, will settle for anything and care about nothing.
She hated the Ones for what they had done to the country she once loved. She hated them for what they had done to the cost of her husband’s prescriptions and the value of her home. She hated them almost as much as the companies that had destroyed the price of eggs while they profited from the financial crisis they caused. She hated them all as much as she hated Obama for selling Hope to buy himself a second try at helping her former employer, who filed for bankruptcy ending her and Gerald’s pensions and healthcare, but not helping good, hardworking, people, like Bernice. Good Americans seemed to get the worst treatment more often lately.
Bernice started to shake. Her empty guts burped acid into themselves loudly in agreement and disgust. She had forgotten to eat again. How long had it been since she had eaten? She forgot to eat often lately.
Bernice dismissed the pointless girl as she had done more and more people in the recent past. The same as she’d done with the browns and blacks that flooded her neighborhood leading up to everything going down. The Ones who went house to house begging, scamming, doing favors on their knees in the alley, for a dose of whatever concoction it was that kept blowing their basement windows out into their front yards.
The pointless young girl looked around. She noticed Bernice noticing her. She stopped.
Bernice bared her teeth and shook her head at the girl.
The girl stared back into Bernice’s leathery, creased face. Her eyebrows raised at Bernice’s expression of distaste. Her eyes rolled up and down from Bernice’s dirty, found wig, to dirty, misshapen tennis shoes and back to sagging, wrinkled, dirty face. The girl’s, maybe, bright painted lips curled away from straight white teeth in a sneer of disgust.
Bernice’s own disgusted look faltered. She had accidentally imagined her own eyebrows, not raised but drawn too high on her forehead, above her creased brow and cracked and sagging cheeks and chapped lips. Her chipped crooked dentures.
The young useless girl shook her head at the filthy bum lady trapped under the giant purse marooned on the park bench. She pinched the brow of her oversized sunglasses and pulled them down to cover her fresh young eyes. She pat her hair one last time, then spun away raising her skirt, leaving Bernice with an unobstructed view of her whole bottom as she walked away.
Bernice turned away, too. Her tired shoulders slouched forward. Her lips trembled. Watching the girl over her shoulder had left the muscles at the sides of her neck in a knot. When she reached up massage her neck it awoken the spasm in her lower back.
Bernice tries to cry. She has cried so much in the past three years. Her mother once told her a story about the tears of Jesus healing the sick, so while Gerald was wasting away during his second try at chemotherapy Bernice would wipe her tears on his hand, where she could feel the I.V. needle under his paper-thin skin.
It didn’t work. Her sainted husband still died in agony in a random hospital bed. Bernice cried the whole time as she sold everything she could. She refinanced their home to pay for his medical care after its value had fallen just as the housing market crashed. She would have leveraged their pensions for a lump sum if she’d known their former employer would file for bankruptcy. Bernice had even cried inside of her jail cell the time she was arrested for protesting in front of the federal building in DC. She wanted to see that someone was held accountable for destroying her life and country. No one ever was.
Bernice reaches down inside herself. She tries to hold onto the pain. The feeling of loss and shame are there. They are ever present. She focuses on those hoping for the release that tears can bring. She finds those and hopelessness to spare down inside of a hole too wide and too deep to fill with tears.
She drops the last fourth of stale saltine in front of her shapeless shoe. The fat duck jerks its beak at the foot beaten earth snatching up the dry salted bread. Bernice opens the seltzer tablet. She snapped it into fourths. The fat duck jerks its head forward at the sound. Bernice holds a dry white piece of seltzer above the head of the eager bird. It opens its wide beak wide. Bernice drops the piece of seltzer. The bird snatches it out of the air. Quickly she drops the other three pieces one after the other.
She expects the duck to taste the plot and refuse the bait, but the duck takes all it can get and waits for more.
Bernice, careful of her neck and back pain, looks around for any witnesses. Only two people out at the moment. Someone in a black hooded sweatshirt, hood up, is walking behind the pointless girl.
Bernice is stopped by the hooded figure. Suddenly seeing someone in such cumbersome clothing in the stifling heat is jarring. She wonders what ailment could inflict someone so severely that they would need to be that well covered in ninety-degree heat. Bernice wonders where the person came from. As Bernice watches the hooded figure suddenly rushes forward. One step behind the oblivious, pointless girl the hooded figure suddenly yanks its sleeve back, revealing a long red tattoo on its right forearm and a small object in its right hand. With a flick of the wrist the small object extends to 4 times its previous length.
Bernice’s body goes suddenly cold. She recognizes the object. A police officer in riot gear had used one just like it on a protester her first day of marching on the front steps of the federal building. It was the first time she ever stepped outside the comfort of those who only see protests on TV. The protester never saw the baton coming. That was also the last time Bernice and Gerald had attended a demonstration that wasn’t authorized by a permit.
Except, that, no, Gerald wasn’t there. He had already passed when that happened. Bernice is confused. Bernice was more often confused lately.
Bernice braces when the hooded figure raises the telescoped baton above its head. The pointless young girl’s body crumples, boneless under the strike. Her legs are folded awkwardly under her still body. An all-black luxury SUV slides to the curb beside her. The driver jumps out in their own black hoodie.
Bernice looks around for someone to call for help. The second hooded figure helps the first toss the pointless young girl into the car’s back seat. Tattooed forearm jumps in back with the unconscious young girl while the driver hurries back to the driver’s side.
Across the park, on the other side of the pond, a police officer in shorts is riding a bicycle. He is wearing dark sunglasses. He is riding around the park in Bernice’s direction. He is oblivious to the violent kidnapping in progress. Bernice stands. She raises her hands above her head. She waves to get the cops attention.
Pop!
Bernice jumps. The fat duck is on its side. It is convulsing at her feet. It flails on its side like running awards Bernice in its sleep. Blood and seltzer foam bubble out of its beak. Red stains the feathers of its bottom. Bernice had forgotten that she was hunting food. The useless girl’s predicament has distracted her. She sits down. She lowers herself into a cloud of her own body odor and self-loathing. The smell of sun warmed grass and duck shit rushes into focus.
With a glace toward the bicycle police Bernice, quickly reaches down for the duck and shoves it into her plastic shopping bag. Its legs are still kicking as she stuffs the plastic bag into her big bag.
She looks up as the kidnapper’s car drives away from the curb in no hurry. The kidnapper makes a right turn passing behind the unsuspecting bicycle cop.
The cop instead is facing Bernice
Bernice knows it is time to go, but her lower back locks up when she tries to stand again. She sits back down and tries to massage her spasming back with the swollen knuckles of her aching fingers.
Bernice has never plucked a duck’s feathers. She begins to expect that the task may be too much for her old hands. She silently curses her bones for aging.
The bicycle cop starts to circle the duck pond. He has raised his sunglasses. He is headed toward Bernice. He is looking directly at her. It is not enough that she had lost everything she loves and owns, now she might lose her freedom, too.
Bernice never showed up to court for the charges of resisting arrest and vagrancy. She had received those when she was arrested for the illegal protest in DC. If she had an address, she was sure the police would having come there to arrest her by now. Now here comes a police officer who will surely have access to her outstanding arrest warrants. On a bicycle, in shorts of all things.
Bernice is suddenly fuming. The powers that be are so focused on her petty life and petty actions that a child can be assaulted and abducted within in plain view of the whole world and a police officer with no notice at all.
This is the system that Bernice had paid into her whole adult life like all good American citizens should. She had paid for one duck a thousand times over.
Or a thousand eggs.
Bernice stands ignoring the pain of her years. She shrugs off her big purse. She tosses her wig over the back of the park bench. Bernice steps out of her shapeless tennis shoes. Her first step forward is cheered by a chorus of clicking, popping joints, as her body protests her sudden movement. Bernice hurries as best she can towards the duck pond. In bare feet, under a wisp of matted, grey hair, she strides toward the pond wondering how many of those duck eggs she can eat before the bicycle cop could swim after her and catch her on that little island.
To be continued…
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