Story: A Friend (part five)

A Friend

(part five)

Wednesday that week, she put on her black cardigan. Not the berry with the faceted buttons, not her best to impress a stranger. She held possessions against the day, from the stub of a pencil to her good lace tablecloth.

“Superstition,” Lorin used to say. “Suppose you put all these treasures in a shoebox, and you put a label on it, and you pack em all in a closet, A to Z.”

 He was a wise guy, her husband, talking like he didn’t know she did this.

“Then you add up the time you worked, against the thing you need once in ten years, you could go ahead and buy it.”

 And here she was, trading what she’d never got the use of. For the citizen-collaborator, there could be no profit. You surrendered, and the G.R.A. profited.

Those people.

They got in the door, they helped you, they made you owe them, they asked you a little favor back. She would lose her silver for nothing. She would lose it trying to keep Anton out of trouble.

She buttoned, and called out, “Anton, are you ready?”

“I’m at the door. I’m waiting for you.” He was dressed in protective things, a thick cabled pullover and dark glasses.

Objects, gemstones and colored glass, square and round shapes, wool and metal, strangers’ inscribed initials, held messages for Anton. He would find in these a directive, to an act he wouldn’t share. He had garments of Lorin’s he wore sleeping, others he’d told her, “No! I don’t want to see this again!” And thrust hands at her, a terrible tension to the set of his jaw.

Today it was fine outside, trees in flower. Suddenly. They hadn’t been Monday, only Monday, the day she did her shopping. The address was in her pocketbook: No. 17, BNE.

“What the heck.”

Herward told her it was walkable, dropping it off, with the pass to keep the box taped. He nodded to Anton’s clothes. “It isn’t winter any longer.”

Anton carried the box. He had repacked it, unwilling to have the Ochiltree woman separate him from his favorites. Samantha Ochiltree [Herward’s card read], Unit Head, Reconciliation Bureau—a place databases were typed onto paper, a vast make-work project.

“It’s not winter,” Mrs. Leonhardt echoed Herward. This landed without response. “I’m always lost, going places,” she said, steps later, “since they made all the changes. Why can’t streets have names?”

She was apologizing, not saying she was sorry, for getting them mixed up.

“They don’t want names on things. They don’t want statues in the parks that commemorate things. They don’t want coast people on the coast and capital people in the capital. Because we get attached and sentimental. Attachment and sentiment are divisive. They want us to think obedience has no cost.”

“Am I allowed to say I don’t care what the G.R.A. wants?”

“But…Mother.”

He let this linger, the dry emphasis and offensive pause.

“Well, what?”

“I suppose a dandelion doesn’t care what the sun wants. But it can’t choose.”

5

Tourmaline

Tourmaline (part six)

(2016, Stephanie Foster)