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, Dream, The Forgotten River and Resurrection of a Sunflower. Her fiction has appeared in Mad Swirl, Visual Verse, Impspired, and Piker Press. 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. Someday she hopes to write a novel.
Bridie in the Desert, 2013
Bridie’s husband is driving the new Toyota Camry west through this empty space beside mountains that look like a wizened giant’s vertebrae. A few clouds scoot past them, not quite dimming the sun. The highway is the closest thing to a river Bridie has seen that day although Frankie says that the Colorado is nearby. One apartment complex bills itself as the Ocean View. She shakes her head. She can’t imagine how people live in this desert, this empty, empty place. To kid yourself that you can see the ocean in LA, over two hundred miles away. She shakes her head again, wishing that she was back in Massachusetts with its tree-covered hills and easy access to the ocean.
But Frankie lived in Blythe, California for a couple of years, waiting for his then- wife Kristy. She imagines that his time here was penance. For what, she does not know. Kristy always struck her as a princess with her neat French braid, white silk sweater, leather jeans, and bare feet on an immaculate tile floor. Even her teenage son had to be barefoot in that “cottage.” On the other hand, Frankie is honorable. Before they were dating, when he was just a security guard at the night dentist’s office, he used to walk her to her car at night. He didn’t like it when patients made dirty jokes in front of her. Or when homeless men on the sidewalk drank and cursed. Before he had even brushed against her, not to mention kissed her, she loved him for his care and consideration.
But from Kristy, Bridie heard that they had lived in a trailer. She pictures the pitiless sun beating down on the metal trailer that someone has left adrift on a pile of sand. The inside of the trailer with its metal walls is cramped and hot, almost too hot to sleep in. She imagines the small family sitting outside in the dark, dark night lit only by stars. At least it is cooler than inside. She knows Frankie will stand apart to watch for coyotes, scorpions, snakes, random people, whatever crawls through the night to find fools from the city. But she knows she will be happy when he returns to the highway and speeds off to LA and his family, to his mother’s ranch house hidden by rose bushes and trees, to the house with one bathroom and a weak, tepid shower.
Once Frankie pulls off the interstate, Bridie is surprised to see how green Blythe is. Tall, spindly palm trees line the road into town. She also sees well-watered grass and flowers here and there. When Frankie drives up to where he used to live, she gasps, “It’s not a trailer!” Eight pink cinderblock cabins are scattered along the highway out of town. Each cabin has its own parking spot. Each has its own flourishing aloe or agave plant; she isn’t sure which. Palms grow in the back around an empty swimming pool. The mountains hover in the distance. This complex has a name: Trails’ End, after the motel that it used to be.
Frankie laughs, “Do you really trust my ex-wife?” After parking the car in front of the office, he shoots out. Bridie and their daughter follow more slowly since Iris doesn’t want to leave the car. Bridie has forgotten how hot this desert can be, even in November. She feels parched immediately. Frankie has already rapped on the office door, and his former landlady Joyce has just popped out. A slim, gray-haired woman with a sleek ponytail, white tank top, and matching shorts to emphasize her tan, she makes Bridie feel pallid and overdressed. Oversized, too, for that matter, as she is taller than both her husband and his former landlady. Bridie’s blonde hair hangs beneath her sun hat. Her sturdy body is swathed in a long-sleeved blouse and linen pants. But she burns in the sun, especially sun as fierce as the late fall sun in Southern California.
The landlady hugs Frankie and then waves over his wife and child. She apologizes for the unseasonably hot weather, telling her it usually don’t get this hot in November. She hugs Bridie and her child, but somehow this feels perfunctory. Bridie stiffens a bit. She worries that this is the end of their journey. That she, Frankie, and their child will be stuck in one of these cabins. That she will wind up driving with Iris west to LAX to escape this desert, these cabins, this woman, this life.
The landlady, Joyce, invites the family into her cool office, offers them something to drink. Bridie proposes to bring out the tumblers of cold water to her family. The other woman shoos her over to the couch. Before she can sit down gracefully, the two little Pomeranians come racing from the kitchen, and a cat leaps onto the desk, knocks off a few papers. Bridie’s daughter Iris, of course, heads straight for the dogs, cooing over them. They are not the dogs she knew back home in Worcester, but they are dogs. Frankie starts talking with his ex-landlady to catch up on all that’s happened since he left Blythe in 2005. Bridie sits on the couch, forcing herself to sip the cold water rather than gulp it. Watching her daughter crawl among the dogs in this air-conditioned office, she starts to feel human again.
“Oooh, the girls want to play sock,” Joyce says, while Frankie keeps talking. She retrieves a tattered sock from her desk drawer and walks it over to her dogs. Once she sits down on the couch, she tells Bridie, “I’m so glad that you all are spending Thanksgiving with us. We’ll have a blast. And I’m thrilled to meet you. Thank God Frankie has found you after that—‘scuse my French—bitch Kristy. Like the kids say, I’m Team Bridie.” As Joyce pats her shoulder with her ringed hand, Bridie tries to smile. Frankie turns around and calls his wife “a reserved New Englander.” She tries to smile more broadly even though she doesn’t feel that they were fair to Kristy, a reserved Californian, a woman who once loved Frankie. Who still may love him.
Before too long, Joyce is driving Bridie to the supermarket in her stick-shift. Bridie is a little nauseous from the other woman’s driving. She tries to ask her questions about Frankie’s life in the desert to keep her mind off this sudden carsickness. Instead, Joyce is giving a tour of her small city. She is praising Oscar’s Stop and Shop, the supermarket that they are going to. Bridie fears that Frankie wants to live in the desert again. She also wonders how Joyce would treat Kristy if she, not Bridie, were riding alongside her. Would she be Team Kristy? Of course, she would.
As the car bounces on the road, Joyce suddenly asks Bridie, “What is it like to have such a charismatic husband? You’re not a musician, are you? It’s kind of like every shy girl’s dream to marry a musician, a star. I remember when I was in high school.” Forcing herself to look at the other woman, Bridie replies, “Frankie’s a good man, a kind man. He protects me, he loves our child, and I love him. And he’s still playing music. He’s in a cover band.”
“Yeah, Frankie’s a good guy. I hope you’re good to him. It broke his heart when Kristy left him. She kept leaving him. One day she just up and left with their son. Drove all the way to LA. Didn’t even leave a note. Even though they had just remarried. Some gals don’t know what they want. He wanted to drive out to find her. I told him, let her come back to you. Which she didn’t. I knew that. He knew that.”
“I will never leave Frankie,” Bridie whispers even though she has also imagined herself driving off with her daughter, flying back East, writing off the last six years as if they were merely a lost weekend.
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