it's 11:57 pm, on November 22, 2001 - carolyn's melancholy.
~
I have been having a really bad day. Actually, on the grand scale of things I've had an okay day, but I've been in a really bad mood for the last, few minutes, and not a great one before that. The neighbors banged on the wall about a song, which is annoying, and like, the disk with my Alexander essay is trash, as of now, and, and.
I still have no idea where the notebook with my train people went-- something ate it into the void. I think there are karmic forces at work to try and stop me from writing: two hard drives fail, two monitors, notebooks lost, and all right before major things. I think maybe I should take it as a sign. But anyway. Some things transcribed from the train.
~*~
It's the same thing, over and over, Carolyn remembers. The same old thing. She gets on the train to go to work and then goes home again. Sometimes she recognizes the people that share her tomb with a view, sometimes they could be a thousand rolls of wallpaper to decorate her living room, the way she sees them plastered to the sides of buildings and humbled, sit begging by the forty stories of her office tower. They paper her life so well, so seamlessly, that when she recognizes one man from the train in the park, walking briskly, her murmured 'hello' and not registers as little as wallpaper paste, gluing him to her world and laying flay, calm, against her empty greeting.
He's a customs inspector, Carolyn remembers dimly. Some kind of customs inspector at the docks downtown, that checks for poison. Or a health inspector. She remembers the poison, not why.
At home, Carolyn wants to make some kind of change. A green instead of cream, a love instead of a cat.
Carolyn thinks she might be feeling her age because she notices the rhythms in other people's speech, their rising and falling. Cadance and eloquence is what her grandmother talked about fondly; she'd been an elocution teacher for a short while, and an actress. She could do any kind of accent, it was her specialty, was the reason she was hired for radio commercials and even a movie. "Speech," Carolyn's grandmother used to say, "Is a matter of taking nonsensical sounds and giving them a rhythm someone else can dance to. And don't ever end a sentence with a preposition."
For a month after she died, Carolyn, barely twelve, ended almost every sentence with 'to'. Otherwise she wasn't a rebellious child.
*
[I had pages and pages about this man, tentatively named Roger, but then the notebook was lost on the train. So I had to start again, and I think this is somewhere in the middle, not the beginning.]
He is not, in fact, a health inspector. He manages the safety office at the docks downtown, administers a thousand things. When he was a child, he wanted to be a race car driver just because the epithet everyone attached to him was always 'responsible'. He figured race car drivers probably weren't very responsible, and when he saw the interview after one of the star drivers was killed, everyone said he hadn't been responsible enough behind the wheel.
Safety manager suited him. He wore a semi-casual suit to work, shoes that could handle the trek downtown and on the oily deck plating of freighters, and tended to smoke when stressed. His nails were always chipped, cracked, because of washing them at work.
He was married, with a kid that didn't know he'd wanted to race cars and would probably never ask. The affair he was having was tepid, but amused him on Thursdays. She was a hard working woman named Carolyn, a bit older than him, who often couldn't meet because of deadlines. His wife was fucking his secretary, he was fairly sure, and so didn't feel that guilty.
He was meeting Carolyn for dinner and drinks tonight, but nothing else because she had to work. His wife Nancy hand't wondered where he'd been for months, and he told Carolyn that he was worried she'd leave him.
Carolyn always said, "Would it be such a hard thing to get used to?"
He didn't really want something more permanent with Carolyn, because they were too different. But she always said if they did come to blows he'd be welcome with her until he caught his feet again.
The idea of even having a toothbrush at her place, however innocent, normally halted the conversation.
*
Today Carolyn drove to work because the trains were all cancelled. Someone had fallen onto the tracks and simply laid there, threatening. Threatening what, none of the bulletins revealed.
She misses the chance to stare surreptitiously at the other passengers, trying to guess where they're going or how long they've been going. A man a few seats away, for example, reading a grammar book, can capture her imagination for as long as it takes to figure out what language he's trying to learn. The woman in sweatpants reading John Grisham, the students with their headphones on listening to -- what, exactly. They sit, polite, wall paintings with all the delicious details of their lives missing, barely a trace save the outline.
Sometimes they talk as if narrating a private scene, and she listens without thinking about it, the patterns of vowels, the stacatto of those few consonents that get pronounced. Most people in this city have drawling speech, uninflected save for the occasional slurring, letters drifting together.
Carolyn misses looking out the window and comparing that flat paced patterning to the scenery which is nothing but sharp trees, piercing mountains, and the grey rushing water of the Inlet. Her car gives her tress, but urbanized and penned in by low-rent housing and the dozens of old farmhouses ready to be torn down along Granview, and finally, the quick and easy pace of the freeway home. On the radio, some tinny DJ drones in nothing that resembles conversation.
~*~
~
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