FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #3

I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. Well, back in New York we would call it the subway, but here in San Francisco it’s BART, which is a deceitful acronym for the Bay Area Rapid Transit, a lie in name because these trains never get you precisely where you need to be anywhere in the Bay Area, nor are they rapid. The speed is good, but there are too few of them. So on any given day, you wait longer for the train that it would have taken to drive to your destination, if, that is, you had a car of your own, which I do not. That’s how it is with the men out here, too; there are too few of them to go around, and the good ones are like seats on BART. They don’t come along too often, and when they do, everyone’s competing for the same one. I never get a seat. Usually I just hang by the door and read the newspaper.

When I first started working for the newspaper, I used to read the entire paper, cover to cover, before I even left the house in the morning. But that’s back when the newspaper was more of an institution than a profit machine, back when I still felt hopeful about going to work. Not now. The old dogs, the ones who actually believed the Fourth Estate was a pillar of good government, are being laid to rest every day now. Sarcasm and criticism are no longer appreciated either, and so it’s just a matter of time before my head rolls, too. These days, I just read enough on the way to work to make it sound like I know what I am talking about, and on Saturdays I read less than usual because there’s not much in the Saturday paper. The editors save any decent Friday stories that can wait till later in the weekend, when only the grunts like me have to work. You can only produce so much content to wrap around the ads, and the Saturday paper tends to get stuffed with more of the paid content like births, deaths and wedding announcements. My old boss suggested once at a staff meeting that we add a ‘divorce page.’ With fewer and fewer reporters expected to produce the same volume of content, he said it would be an efficient method of feeding the beast while entertaining readers because divorce is a lot more interesting than babies. But that would break one of our institution’s cardinal rules. We never report a suicide or a divorce unless it involves a ‘public figure,’ which is a gray category of person that can be broadly inclusive or very narrowly defined depending on the particular interests of the publisher that week. So I don’t bother with much of the Saturday paper, especially not the paid announcements. But there he was, staring at me just past the Macy’s ad, and it was like he was with me on that train, grinning his way out of society to mock me. “Anastasia Sterling, daughter of Lord William Sterling, heir to the House of Sterling, and Baroness Wilhelmina Claussen of Austria … to wed George Banks.” The paper ran red with what I guess was rage or envy, and I suppose it was something more sinister than curiosity that inspired me to ditch work and walk over to the cathedral to check out the ceremony.

The announcement went on and on about her -- graduate of Princeton, personal aide to Dick Cheney, equestrian champion in the 1988 Olympics. These were paid ads for us, and it was pretty obvious her parents had paid for it because it said almost nothing about George. “Manages a Berkeley-based manufacturing company.” That’s all it said about him. His mother had been a famous poet, but she killed herself after the divorce, and that doesn’t make for happy reading in the wedding pages. The wire reported it, but we didn’t. She did not fit our category of ‘public figure’ because it happened in New Jersey, and that was determined to be geographically insignificant to our readers.

I was surprised to read he was still with his dad’s company. Before we’d split up, he said he would never work there, even if his life depended on it. But that’s back when he thought we could pick our own food and live on love in New Zealand. When we decided to abort the baby, a lot of that changed. I learned then that sinners are not born; they’re made. Regret is a strange emotion. If you’re sad, you can usually find a way to be happy again, but when you regret something, I mean deeply regret something, there’s no way back to the person you were before.

The wedding was like a set from the The Sound of Music with a white silk runner framing the aisle of the cathedral and all, except that the church was decorated for Christmas, which made it even worse. For me, I mean, because my baby would have been born the week before Christmas, and with every passing Advent, seven in all, I counted off another year of the life I stole. I stood there in the foyer in my frumpy black pantsuit and pretended to be part of the bride’s family (I wanted to sit on the other side of the aisle where I’d have a good view of those people who pretended to like me once.) They weren’t immediately convinced that I hadn’t just wandered in off the street, which I had, in a way. Although what I was doing was worse. I was hell bent on sabotaging the whole thing.

I don’t know what kind of music they had up there in the balcony, but it sounded like a full orchestra playing Handel or something like that. The lady next to me was picking her nose and probably hoping no one would notice because she hid behind her program and just flicked them off her fingers like dead skin. “Pity what they say, Ethel, isn’t it,” she said, digging a little deeper with the program hiding her nose.

The orchestra, or whatever it was, morphed into a classical take on “The Wedding Song,” and She came marching down the aisle in full regalia, the bride I wanted be. Little bitch. She wasn’t even fat. In fact, for the daughter of a Polish baroness who was probably raised on moldy cheese and caviar, or whatever those defunct Eastern European royals ate, she looked real pretty. Younger than me, for sure, which meant she was way younger than George. Young girls always get the good seats, but that’s not something you really notice until you’re older.

George didn’t look so good, which was a relief. In the years since I had seen him, he must have put on twenty pounds, and his face looked pink and bloated. Probably he was just hung over. But maybe he was unhappy with that Berkeley manufacturing plant of his. Maybe life was better when lunch grew on trees. I would have stayed there with him, but after he made me kill the baby, nothing was possible. He saw me on his way down the aisle, and he winked at me. I turned beet red. But then how could he know I hadn’t been invited somewhere on down the line? How could he know I would tell them all what we had done? If anyone objects to this union, let him speak now or forever hold his peace. I would tell them, tell the whole congregation George was a cheater and a baby killer. Let the chips fall where they may, but know this, girlfriend: he can’t be trusted. If he had known what I was going to do, he would have dragged me out of there by the hair. But we never know what’s around the corner, and sometimes that’s a good thing.

“Look at him, Ethel, would you?” the lady with the boogers said. “He’s no catch.”

Ethel shook her hatted head in agreement. “Nothing like I imagined.”

“No, nothing like the other one.” She sneezed all over the pew. “But this one’s got money. And you know how they are.”

“Shh! Do you want Lenore to hear you?”

“I don’t care if she does hear me. Serves her right.”

The minister had initiated the vows, and I was waiting for my cue. “Please!” I said, glaring at the booger lady. “Keep it down.”

So she continued in a whisper, “You marry for money and you think you have it all, but then what do you have when they lose all their money?” They both giggled. “A fat old man.” They laughed so hard that the couple in the pew in front of us hushed them. “And a philanderer to boot!”

The minister turned to George, “And do you, Mr. Banks, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife? To have and to hold, to love and to cherish, to honor and obey, until death do you part?”

“I do,” he said. I felt like I had heard it before.

I would leap right up and shout it out to the whole congregation.

The booger lady continued in a whisper. “Honor and obey and don’t get that skinny ass of yours pregnant.”

“She’s pregnant?”

She picked another one and wiped it beneath the bench of the pew. “No, and she never will be. They signed one of those, what do you call them? Pre-suptuals. Got her tubes tied in exchange for that wedding ring. No babies, and she can’t touch his money. His money. Hah! Do you think I would ever sign something like that?”

“There’s a good reason you’re not married.”

The couple in front of us lost patience and told the booger lady to shut up just as the minister began his final plea to reason. “If anyone knows why this couple should not wed, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.”

The booger lady had said enough, but she didn’t choose to say it for everyone to hear. Me neither. I decided to keep my peace.

George beamed at me on the way down the aisle and winked again. I didn’t smile back at him. I left through the side door to avoid seeing him at the congratulations train. It had begun to rain, and I could have covered my head with the newspaper for the long walk back to work. But I let the rain run down my cheeks like tears, absolving me of my sins, and I thanked God that it was the daughter of the baroness on the altar that morning instead of me.

When I got back to the office, the editor was surprised to see me. A woman had leapt onto the tracks, and the BART trains were stopped at Civic Center. Stopping a BART train, no matter who you are, instantly places you in the class of public figure, and she was hoping I’d come back with some ‘color,’ which is a polite term for all those personal details that set the scene in a newspaper story (except that the new editor refused to pay cab fare to get it). “We thought you were trapped,” she said, disappointed.

“Almost.” I was soaking wet and shivering and relieved. “I got off the train just in time.”

back to Contest #3