deeplyshallow // eleanor no. 38

eleanor no. 38

Dwight Yoakam’s “Honky-Tonk Man” plays thinly on the jukebox beside the bar. That the bar has a jukebox, that this song would be playing on it, seems almost a given to Eleanor, who has never been inside this bar before. It is exactly what she has always imagined it would be, when she has passed it on the street. Its exterior seems assembled from tornado debris: wide, battered sheets of corrugated metal are hammered together over a shell of plywood; a tangled seine net is strung across a corner of the entrance, scuffed white floaters gone dingy from years in the water. There is a neon sign that says Coors. Another says Miller. The beers are uniformly midwestern and tasteless, the signs say. The signs say, you’ve been in this bar before. Might’ve been in Omaha. Might’ve been Detroit. Same everywhere.

Eleanor sits uncomfortably on a stool. It wobbles, more even than she does. She sips slowly a glass of straight whiskey. It tastes as bad as she feels. The whiskey tastes a little better as time passes, but she only feels worse. This isn’t how it’s supposed to work.

The song ends with a crackle. The song that replaces it is “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain”. Eleanor feels simultaneously as if she might lift off of her stool and float, and as if gravity has swelled up to pull her hard to the floor. She hangs in the space between, heavy and warm. The song ends before she has even registered its presence. In the silence that follows, an elderly gentleman who looks at Eleanor as if he knows she belongs anywhere other than here walks painfully slowly to the jukebox. He stands at the selection board for a hundred hours, and when he finishes, the song which rolls out to weigh down Eleanor’s sagging heart is an old Everly Brothers song. The old man shuffles back to his stool, where he props his forehead on his knuckles and in the hollow between his arms and chest, he hums along.

Eleanor has fallen out of practice; she doesn’t hold her liquor like she did in college. She beckons for the bartender, who is younger than she is. He lifts his eyebrows and she doesn’t even know if she has called him over for another whiskey or to pay her tab. He looks at her empty glass and sad eyes and says, “Looks like you’ve had a night,” and she nods, relieved. She pays her tab with a fifty and leaves the change on the bar. Dolly Parton is singing as Eleanor pushes through the door and into the frozen night. The door closes behind her, but Dolly’s voice seeps out through the seams in the structure.

The car is a cave. Only a small amount of snow drops from the windows when she slams the door shut. The interior is soaked in snowy shadow; the weight of the snow accumulated on the windshield has crystallized the bottom layer into ice. She keys the engine and switches the wipers on. Some of the snow brushes away, but the rest sticks to the ice. Eleanor sits inside the tomblike car as the defroster slowly warms away the ice. Little sound filters into the car from outside: the crack of slow tires on new ice; the skitch of wind against the icy car; the click of ice falling onto the hood from the power lines above. The town has transformed into an ice palace again. Eleanor realizes only now that this means she has wasted a year here. A year since Harold discovered her asleep in her car during an ice storm much like the one that was coming on now.

Enough of the ice has melted that she can see; she drives, navigating through a porthole of foggy glass, steering her snow-ship through a dark white world. She is sleepy. Her head and hands feel thick. Her tongue is heavy. She drives, and somehow she knows that before too long she will see the flicker of colorful lights behind her, and she is right. The blues and reds stain the curtain of snow that covers her rear window, mesmerizing her as she waits for the approach of footsteps crunching on the shoulder. She wonders where Harold is. It occurs to her that not knowing is okay. She isn’t even sure why she has been drinking; maybe it is because a woman whose man has left her is a classic American caricature, and one that stalls its own story time and again on a bar stool. Abruptly she realizes that she is not the classic spurned woman: she is an abandoned expectant mother.

When the officer’s boots finally come crunching down the ice-crusted blacktop, Eleanor’s car door is open and she is throwing up forty-two dollars’ worth of whiskey onto the ice. The officer says, “Ma’am,” and Eleanor looks up and says, “I really can’t believe I’ve done this,” and then throws up again.