Partners

There was a woman on the streetcar today. Her hair was spun perfect. Her lipstick was muted and followed the lines of her soft lips, neither seeping nor giving way at the edges that time makes when it lays its silky map on our skin.  She is reading. In today’s paper there is a husband searching for his husband and a war maybe not about to begin and a person who cannot be named who died from a mosquito bite. Right here in the City. But we should not be and should be alarmed because we don’t know, yet, whether the person was old, which would make it less. Frightening.  All okay, then, if something else was already wrong. Something setting him her it apart from she me us.

She has draped a thin white cardigan over her dress, which is colorful but not overdone, which comes, as it should this year, to the soft peak above her knees, and she is wearing glasses that bear not a single mark of the day. Not a print. Not a sheen. She is clean. Her shoes are black and seem to the lazy glance to be flats, but they are not. They are toe shoes. She could, if she wished, step through this car on the very tips of her feet. She could dance. Her legs show a memory of dancing. She danced, before her veins turned blue and red and her skin went translucent.  She has moved through this world. She can move.

But she is old. And she did not see the spidery slit that opened in her pantyhose just above the ankle bone. She does not know that now there are three darts, pointing down in sharp arrows and threatening like clouds to break apart and scatter a wreckage of unruly, spiny splits across her legs that cannot be gathered back together again. That this will be her tell. That she will feel unravelled.

He is home. He watched her go. He didn’t notice, or didn’t say or didn’t care about the tiny run. He thought she wouldn’t care, or didn’t dare mention it, or thought, well. He thought she’d be fine. She is always fine. Always has gone out on her own all right. All this time, he has known that she does all right on her own. But he is wrong.

And so are you.