Marianne Szlyk is a professor of English and Reading at Montgomery College. Her poems have appeared in of/with, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, the Sligo Journal, Verse-Virtual, the Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Sheila-na-gig, and Bold + italic,  as well as a few anthologies such as Green Elephant, The Forgotten River and Resurrection of a Sunflower. Her flash fiction has appeared in Mad Swirl and Visual Verse. Her books Why We Never Visited the Elms, On the Other Side of the Window, and Poetry en Plein Air are available from Amazon and Bookshop.   

After Looking at Pictures of Colorado, 2015

after“Mobile Home Park. North of Denver.” By Robert Adams (American), 1973. https://artblart.com/tag/robert-adams-mobile-home-park-north-edge-of-denver/

David clutches Mary’s hand as they stroll through the National Gallery to continue their Sunday together. It will end only when he walks upstairs to his study. As usual, they talk fitfully through the cafeteria and bookstore before entering her favorite building, the East building, the gallery of modern and contemporary art. Perhaps they don’t need to talk. Hardly anyone talks in public these days, she reminds herself as she tries to quicken her pace, to match his effortless stride, the stride of a man almost a foot taller than she is.

Still clutching her hand, he leads her into a small gallery of photographs. She recognizes the Colorado landscape. There, once, pregnant with the child she would lose, she fainted from the sun. She wonders what David thinks of this arid place, bleached of all color, where a few trees hoard shade. He grew up in Hawaii. She looks up to him, smiles but cannot read his smooth face. He prefers older paintings, the Hudson River School’s vast lushness or French paintings just before the Impressionists. He likes Manet’s Olympia, says its fierceness reminded him of her.

She coolly takes in the black-and-white photographs of mountains, ranch houses built on a hillside, abandoned churches and movie theaters in the country, all before her time. This is not her Colorado. Then she stops at the blond girl barefoot in a trailer park, mountains effaced by smog. That girl reminds her of her older daughter, Neveah. Without her medical Barbie, without her pink light-up sneakers. Without her poise that her father’s family now nurtures.

“I used to live there with my daughters,” she whispers. “With my husband.”

He lets her hand fall and walks away.

            “You always visit art museums, Mary, but I’ve never heard you talk about your own art.”

            Jenny glances away, then takes off her glasses, intending to polish them with the sleeve of her cotton sweater. But she looks up and begins talking again.

            “Maybe you need to take art classes at the community center. You need something to do. Besides working and mooning around after David. Besides running on a treadmill.”

            Mary doesn’t speak or look down at her phone. She doesn’t need to. It has only been three or four hours, but no one has texted her. David, of course, hasn’t texted her. At this time on Sunday, he locks himself upstairs in his study.  Jenny herself should have been immured in the basement with her papers from the local community colleges, but an hour ago Mary texted her frantically from the Metro platform. She had even looked for David in the gallery with Thomas Cole’s immense, rocky landscapes. Landscapes where he can lose himself, imagining himself hiking for days through a wilderness that doesn’t exist anymore.

            “Look at this, Mary.” Jenny waves a glossy literary magazine at her. “It’s a drawing, a meditation. The artist did this while traveling around Central America with just a backpack. You could meditate, then draw at home or on the subway. Forget that guy.”

            Mary shakes her head at the moon that looks like a leaf, the sky that looks like mountains. Home these days is the first floor of David’s house. Perhaps if she returns, he will merely ignore her, not even be icy. His smile, his gaze would be blank. She would pay him rent again, slip the check under his study door. She would forget that he told her that Manet’s Olympia reminded him of her. It was a misunderstanding.

            He has been avoiding her, has been doing that for four or five hours now.

            “Stay for dinner, Mary. We can catch up. My son is not cooking tonight. ”

            “I used to cook,” Mary says wistfully, remembering the dishes her mother had taught her so many years ago.  Pork roast with orange slices and mojo criollo from the Latino grocery. Ceviche with scallops and shrimp. Sole Veronique, flounder simmered with green grapes.

            But those dishes she knows how to make are too spicy for David. He doesn’t like garlic, even when it is roasted, even when it is in spaghetti sauce. Not that he can eat spaghetti—unless it is gluten free. She grimaces, remembering how he poked at her prize dish, pork roast with orange slices and mojo criollo from the store in Mt. Pleasant. Later, as he made miso soup with seaweed and tofu, he told her that the spices from the pork had burned his mouth. She recalls wrapping up the pork roast and hiding it in their freezer. She can’t remember whether she ate the roast bit by bit or threw it out.

Mary’s phone goes off. She looks down. David is asking where she is and when she will be coming home.

            Mary cautiously unlocks the door to David’s house. She can imagine Jenny clucking over how foolish she is. But where can she go?
            Once inside, she unlaces, then slips off her plain white sneakers, and places them in the tray beside the door. She wonders if she will be able to keep her shoes on when she is renting again. Or would the lease require her to pad through these rooms in stocking feet? At least she wouldn’t need to be barefoot in winter. David has told her more than once that she has beautiful feet as he cradles them in his large hands. If he were merely her landlord, she could give up the pumices, creams, and pedicures—if only to save up to move into a stranger’s basement.
            She wafts through the living room, the dining room, and the narrow kitchen. She sees that the door to the back stairs is closed. On the other side, Emily meows to be allowed downstairs, but the door is locked from the inside. Mary circles back to the living room, to the red antique couch where she will be sleeping this evening. She’ll have to find a way to bring her clothes down from upstairs. True, David texted her “when are you coming home?” She doesn’t trust his text. Why did he just walk off?
            She sits down on the couch and fires up her laptop. She wonders about the music that she will be able to play when she is a renter. “Nothing Compares 2 U” runs through her head. David doesn’t like Sinead O’Connor. He says she scares him. When she sang that song, O’Connor had been a tiny, birdlike woman, albeit one with a shaven head.  David would have towered over her. Perhaps he could have disarmed her with his nerdy charm, the shrug of his shoulders, his curly hair, his near-sighted smile. Perhaps not.

            “Mary, you’re home. Where were you?”

            Somehow David appears, barefoot, looking stricken when he should be working on a grant proposal or a journal article. He has changed into his work-at-home clothes: a blank white t-shirt, baggy shorts the color of unbleached canvas. Emily leaps onto the coffee table, rubs up against the laptop and an empty coffee mug from this morning.

            “But you left me.” Mary tries to speak up for herself. “I looked for you.”

            Maybe if he had texted her the way he usually did when it was time to meet up. “Mary, Mary, where you going to?” If she had seen that phrase from that song on her phone, she would have felt less tense, less scared.

            “I don’t know. I had to work. I’m sorry, Mary. It was too much that you had kids. That you used to live in a trailer park.”

            He sits down beside her, not yet touching.

            “I had two daughters. We lived in a nice house outside Denver. The house had a cathedral ceiling. Now my daughters live with their uncle and aunt. Their father’s family. They thought it would be better that way. My parents thought that, too.”

            She doesn’t want to explain.

            “The father?”

            “Out of the picture.” Mary refuses to say anything more as Emily, without claws, pads across the keyboard.

            “Poor Mary.” David reaches for her hand. “Don’t tell me anymore.”

            She smiles, shakes her head. She knows that it is too much for him as he leads her upstairs as he always does. Her life won’t have to change. She won’t have to sleep on this short, narrow couch. She won’t have to bring her clothes down. At night, she won’t have to wash up in the downstairs bathroom. She won’t be sitting, sleepless on this couch, with headphones, listening to Sinead O’Connor keen for her, without even Emily to keep her company.

            At least not for now. At least not until David disappears again.