Like Coordinates

a story for The Scheherazade Project

He used the women’s bathroom because some fool had got drunk and locked himself into the men’s then passed out, and Miss Mabel didn’t want to break the door or the window. Yet.

He waited as long as he could. He must have gone outside a dozen times trying to find a secluded spot to go but there were couples everywhere it seemed. The call to war seemed to do that to people, make them couple up. His own little brother was about to be married. “Ain’t she just as pretty as a little baby doll?” his brother would ask of any and everyone, again and again.

He made his buddy stand at the door as he went in to this sanctuary. He could see the shadows of women in their trumpet heels and seamed stockings, their swinging skirts and fitted jackets, their hair in rolls and under hats with demure feathers -- he could see shadows in the mirror above the sink. Even as he took it out to pee, it wanted to swell for them. He stared at the corner instead, listened to the steady stream that was just warmed up beer, tried to think of anything other than being here.

He finished, shook himself dry, tucked himself back into his underwear, zipped his fly. And with the thought of being in the women’s bathroom finally not being the foremost in his mind, he saw it. A pretty little script, small amongst the bold declarations of love and eternal affection, the angry accusations of inadequacy and infidelity, desperate pleadings with God to let someone come home. The same sentence, written twice: “Is this all? Is this really all?” And a phone number.

Instantly it was in his mind, like home base coordinates.

He didn’t call it though. He would wake up seeing it. He shipped out, European theater, bombing Germany. Once, three days in a row, the entire squadron that went out before his didn’t come back. They’d move their gear in, and move it out again, and the boys were like those shadows in that bathroom mirror. And he’d think, “Is this all? Is this really all?” and the number would glow neon in his mind.

He lived through his 25 missions by sitting on his flak jacket. He went home. He started training others, and doing whatever military work was assigned. He was stationed near his little brother’s wife. His brother was in the Pacific. He called on her once a month or so. He called to check on her for his brother, although she lived with her parents and her sister and there was really no reason to check. Still he called on her and wrote to his brother about where they’d gone and how pretty she had looked and how much she missed him. He always had trouble saying how much he missed him.

Except for at the wedding, he’d never met her family. He would call her at her work. During war everyone worked. They would meet at any one of several restaurants, most featuring Maryland crab in some form. She would talk about them some. Her parents were easy going, her sister a bit more uptight and unmarried although a few years older than herself. They would talk about his brother, her husband, and what they’d done as boys, the trouble they’d gotten into as young men, how earnest and sincere and serious he was for all his good-timing.

And then they both got word that his brother, her husband, had been killed in action on an island in the Pacific. His body would stay there until after the war. There was really nothing to do right now except to keep doing what they’d been doing. Except now they didn’t have anything at all to say. They met and ordered something to eat. He drank a beer. She lit a cigarette. He took a pen out of his pocket in idleness and doodled on the napkin. It started out with rows of x’s, like his mother used to make, but then he was drawing clouds, like you see them when flying above them, and he didn't even know he knew how to do that. And then he’d found the numbers in them, the numbers that had been on that bathroom wall with the words, “Is this all? Is this really all?”, and he traced over them again and again.

She exhaled a puff of smoke and as if in slow motion put her hand across the table and onto the napkin. Their eyes met and he released the napkin to her, he didn’t know why. She slid it across the table, not picking it up but turning it around to face her.

“How do you know that number?” she asked, calmly, flatly. He didn’t answer, just looked at her dumbfounded. “How do you know that number? That’s my sister’s private number.”

“I’ve never called it,” he said.

“How do you know it?” she asked again, insistence in her voice though not impatience, and he explained, as best he could, which wasn’t too good. She didn’t say much about it but did say that they’d both visited that bar with her husband -to-be when they’d made a premarital trip to meet his parents.

The next time he checked on his brother’s wife, took her out to eat, she didn’t show up.

But her sister did.

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