Fiction from The Literary Review

Jamie Schwartz

Sonia Days

I drove to the Key Food to pick up fruit punch, soda, pretzels, popcorn, fresh milk, vanilla ice cream, and favors for the fourteen six year olds who would soon occupy my living room. Sonya woke up that morning singing and dancing. I’d had a few too many glasses of wine the night before, and her chirpy voice made me squint. I thought about giving her some Dimetap and letting her take a mid-morning nap. I almost did it, thinking it would make her more vibrant for the birthday party, but I stopped myself. She sat at the kitchen table, splashing the back of her spoon into a bowl of Cheerios, her legs kicking back and forth under the table. I planned to let Sonya pick out caramels and mints in the metallic wrappers from the barrels of bulk candy in the food store, but at the last minute I called my mother to watch her while I ran to the Key.
           The parking lot was full and I inched around the lanes, waiting for somebody to pull out. A big woman with a screaming baby wedged into her armpit was dragging two carts full of packages to her car. I followed behind her and waited with my blinker on as she bent into the back of her car and strapped the baby into the car seat. She came around to the trunk and started loading in bag after bag. I saw white bread and frozen chicken nuggets poking out and I immediately formed a disdainful judgment of this woman. She looked over at me. I guess she thought I was giving her a dirty look for taking too long, because she screwed up her face, letting a lungfull of air seep from her pursed lips, “Pssssssssss.” She started moving more slowly, arranging the bags snugly in the trunk.
           I always get in these situations where I’m misunderstood, taken as an asshole when I’m really a lovely woman. I wanted to stick my head out the window and shout, “No! I wasn’t giving you a dirty look. I was just watching you load your food!” But you can’t do that. Once someone is offended, you can’t fix it without running around in circles. She slammed the trunk down hard, and as she walked around to the driver’s side, she flipped me the bird. I pulled into the parking spot and sat there for a few minutes with my elbows propped on the steering wheel, my face in my hands. I felt guilty for wanting to drug my daughter. I felt guilty for not bringing her with me and letting her rummage through the candy. She was a normal child, energetic but not hyperactive. No attention deficit. She could sit on the floor for two to three hours at a time, playing with dominoes. She’d stack them up higher and higher until they toppled; then she’d laugh to herself and start over. Once in a while she’d call out to show me the eight-inch-high tower she’d created and I’d smile half-heartedly and go back to my book. “That’s great, honey.”
           I looked up and realized that there was a car sitting behind me, waiting for me to pull out. A bald man was leaning out his window, slapping his crimson door. I got out and waved to him. I was embarrassed. “Jesus lady,” he shouted and screeched away.
           “Damn it,” I said to myself. I slammed the car door. Then I felt bad about slamming the car door. We owned a 1987 Ford Escort that was on the brink of falling apart completely. Sometimes, while driving, I’d have cartoonish visions of the dark green doors, the striped hood, the automotive innards coming loose, flying off the car, and bouncing into a ditch, leaving me puttering along the highway in a stripped metal frame. All the other drivers would pass my smoking wreck, staring at me like I was a lunatic.
           My husband constantly begged me to be gentle with the car. He thought that I gunned the engine too much, that I let the gas get too low, that I somehow got crumbs in the radiator by throwing empty pretzel bags on the floor, that I was rough with the knobs of the radio (which, without my interference, changed stations as we went over small bumps and cracks in the road), and that I was, in effect, trying to kill the car so that we would have to buy a new one.
           “She’s old. You’ve got to treat her right,” he told me the night before, stroking the dashboard. He’d had a few drinks too. “You hear me, babe?” I stared at him blankly. His small red mouth curled up at the corner. “You’re just waiting for her to die,” he said, running his hand up my thigh as we pulled to a stoplight. “You’re just pushing her towards the cliff.”
           I often wondered whether this accusation was true. I’d watched him soap up the car in the driveway the Saturday before. I stared at the wet car, covered in bubbles, and had no feeling about it one way or the other. I suppose I wouldn’t have minded a new car, one that had air-conditioning, but I didn’t care enough to pursue a new car.
           I headed through the parking lot towards the grocery store, tossing a tote bag over my shoulder. I’d gotten the bag from Channel Thirteen, when I pledged eighty dollars while watching a six-hour documentary mini-series about Abraham Lincoln. After Abe and Mary’s son Willie died, Mary broke down. She stayed in bed all day long for weeks, for months, refusing all visitors and ignoring her other children. One night the President took her over to the window and pointed through the night to a large lit building. Her told her to get a hold of herself or they might have to send her to the loony bin. Scared straight.
           Two hours into the show, there was a break and a blond woman in a red wrap-around dress explained that programs like Abraham and Mary: A House Divided would not be possible without the support of viewers like me. I felt guilty, as if I’d sneaked into a movie theater (which I did all the time as a teenager, but felt bad about later in life.) I was a thief. The blond woman interviewed Nathan Lane. He pleaded that I not be an ungrateful bastard, that I not drive PBS to bankruptcy. Nathan Lane thought I was a thief as well. I called and made a pledge. They sent me the tote, which I used for grocery shopping, and a video of the Lincoln documentary, which I never took out of the plastic.
           I grabbed a cart from the long row outside the grocery store and rolled through the mechanized doors. A man stood in the produce aisle, watering the lettuce with a small hose. I thought about buying some baby carrots for the kids. It would be good to give them something healthy, so the mothers could look at the table and think I was responsible. But six year olds weren’t going to touch carrots when there was candy around. I knew they would end up as little dried-up fingers, piled on a paper plate. Why bother? Why waste the dollar forty-nine?
           It was cold in the grocery store and I was wearing a sleeveless sweater. So stupid for not bringing a light coat. My mother always sniped at me for not dressing myself, or Sonya for that matter, in enough clothes. “It’s only forty-five degrees outside,” she’d say. “Sonya needs the wool coat!” I usually scoffed at her. She was a classic over-protective. Why strap Sonya into a straightjacket of scarves, sweaters, and hats that tie under the chin? She never complained about the cold. She was a sweet, happy, healthy child. But, as I looked through the bags of chips, rubbing the gooseflesh off my arms, I wondered if I really was negligent. Maybe this was why Sonya got so many colds. I grabbed a bag of buttered popcorn off the shelf and tossed it in the cart.
           As I rolled down the juice aisle, I saw a teenaged boy kneeling over a case of cranberry cocktails. He held a pricing gun and attacked the bottles with orange sale-price stickers, his arm pumping up and down as he hit each bottle. It was a lanky arm with tan skin. Small hard muscles clenched rhythmically and I thought about stroking the arm as I passed by but, of course, I refrained from doing so. He probably would have looked at me with distaste, although I was an attractive woman. I had long black hair and dark eyes. I knew young boys liked the idea of an older woman, because as a teenager my male friends talked endlessly about fucking my mom, who, at the time, wore above-the-knee skirts and breast-hugging tops.
           But the stockboy had probably seen my husband and me prowling the aisles after work, with Sonya sleeping or screaming in the front seat of the cart. I turned to get a look at the boy’s face as I passed. He had thick eyelashes and bony cheeks. As he worked, he moved his shoulders from side to side with the music playing on his headphones. He mouthed a few of the words and I got a glimpse of his tongue. My husband’s mouth was always bright red and moist, too. My own lips cracked, even in summer, though I slathered them ten to twelve times a day with thick medicated jelly.
           I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing as I turned out of the juice aisle towards frozen foods. I smacked into something. A three-year-old boy was sitting next to my cart, his lip quivering. He wore denim overalls, with no tee-shirt underneath. His tiny nipple poked out from behind the strap. “It’s too cold for him to be wearing that,” I thought. “His mother must be crazy.” A tall woman was running towards me, her beige trench coat flapping behind her like a cape. I approached the boy, holding my hands out to help him back onto his feet, and dust the packing hay off his behind. “Oh no, are you okay honey?” I crooned. As I bent down, he crossed his arms in front of his face as if I was about to hit him.
           “It’s okay…it’s okay,” the mother assured me as she swiped him off the floor. Her brown curls were wild. “You should watch where you’re going.” Her smile was crooked. As she rushed away, her elbow bumped my cart. I caught it just before it veered into a pyramid of crushed tomatoes.
           When I rolled away, I was shaking. I wished that I could make friends easier. I’d had Sonya for a while already and I didn’t know any other young mothers. When I was pregnant, women with shining faces and swollen abdomens, women that I’d never seen before would come up and touch my stomach. “How far along?” they’d ask, and then they’d tell me how far along and we’d discuss private matters: our doctors, our sonograms, our uteruses, in the middle of the department store or the parking lot or wherever we happened to be.
           After I had Sonya, it wasn't the same. I’d walk her down the street in a covered carriage and people would smile politely and move out of the way as I passed, but nobody wanted to talk anymore. I had the feeling that I had fooled everyone while I was pregnant, but once they saw me with the baby in my arms, it was obvious that I didn’t deserve her, that I wouldn’t take good care of her. I knew the mothers of the other children in Sonya’s class didn’t like me. I imagined them standing in a semi-circle in my living room later that afternoon. Ginny Conway in a hideous pink polo-shirt and ill-fitting beige shorts, covering her mouth with two fingers as she whispered about how I hadn’t even gotten a clown or a puppeteer. “No wonder Sonya is such a behavior problem. Did you hear Ms. Elliot found her under a table with Justin Thompson? Neither of them had pants on. Can you imagine?”
           My stockboy was in frozen foods when I arrived. He was talking to a young girl. A blue cropped top showed off the lump of her belly button, which poked out as if the tube had just been tied. He pinned her to one of the freezers, leaning one hand on the glass, next to her head. She looked down at the thongs on her feet, smiling as he whispered in her ear. I could imagine what he was saying as he traced her collarbone with his finger. I felt nauseous. She couldn’t have been older than fourteen. She even looked like Sonya, with blond hair that only curled at the ends. I was disgusted by kids, such morons.
           When I first met my husband, at a party in college, he came up behind me and grabbed my ass, sticking his hand so far between my legs that I could feel his fingers pricking into my crotch. “Nice ass,” he told me and I spun around to see him, red eyes and face drenched in whiskey sweat.
           I wanted to run over and throw the stockboy down onto the speckled linoleum floor, knock the wind out of him. I imagined him stiff and frightened as I pulled off my underwear and sat down on his face, ground down onto him. What would he think of that? What would he think of an actual woman instead of a child? Muffled noises would come from between my legs, and Older Sonya could watch as he smothered. I shivered as the thought passed through my head. As I pushed my cart past the couple, I turned my head from them.
           I had, actually, drugged Sonya once. We were flying to Colorado to visit my husband’s parents. I thought the flight would be a great adventure for Sonya. For weeks she planned what items she would pack in the purple book bag I said she could bring on the plane: graham crackers, a few toys, colored pencils. She even made me give her one of my tubes of Vaseline, after hearing me tell my husband that the dry air on the plane would be murder on my lips.
           “You don’t need that, Pumpkin,” my husband fake-whispered in her ear. “You don’t have alien lips, like Mommy!” Sonya squealed, bringing her fists up to her cheeks. But when we strapped her into her seat on the plane, she turned gray. Her eye sockets sunk into her head. Tears dripped down her face and she gripped the seat cushion under her knees. I leaned down to her. “What’s wrong, honey?” She stared straight ahead. I put my hand on her shoulder and felt her muscles coil up tightly. My husband was pulling at the short whiskers under his chin. He looked down at Sonya helplessly. She made a muted noise and then screamed, “I wanna get awwwwwf!”
           The tall woman across from us looked like she wanted to rip my daughter’s skin off. The man behind me started to shift around in his seat, pushing his knees into my back. “Oh, God,” I muttered and rummaged through my purse for the bottle of Valium. I broke a pill into pieces and mashed a tiny one into powder on the tray, using my credit card. I sprinkled the white dust into a sippy cup and mixed it with apple juice. Sonya took the cup from my hand and her sobs began to die down. My husband looked at me with wide eyes. “She’ll be fine,” I told him and we listened to her little sucking noises as the plane took off.
           I wanted to leave the grocery store. I had to get home. As I tossed my groceries onto the cashier’s conveyor belt, I imagined my daughter waiting for me on the front porch with my mother, lifting her arms when she thought she saw my car, her fresh forehead glinting as she tilted her face toward the sun. I rushed out to the Ford and threw my packages into the back seat. The car bounced as I turned the ignition and gunned the engine. I just thought it ridiculous to be gentle with something like a car. Cars are supposed to be able to stand up to rough use. As far as I was concerned, you used a car like you used it, until it was dead. You didn’t pussyfoot around a car. You can’t save a dying goldfish. But my husband treated the car like an infant, coaxing it gently, “Come on, baby,” until the engine turned over.