Page 53 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. IV #9

MArINA ruBIN
Bad Couples
Good People Make
I was getting married.
After work I took the train to his place, as I prom- ised. He was already waiting for me, sitting on his stoop with that cowed look of apology and hang- over. And he started slowly, making an effort to articulate every word, “I have been thinking.”
Neither of us wanted to get married...but our relationship was like a suitcase of unnecessary things in that Ukrainian proverb, тяжко нести, й жалко кинути: too heavy to carry, but oh... such a shame to drop.
And I stopped him right there and then, because I knew what he was going to say next and I whis- pered, “You have been thinking enough and you’ve made your decision.”
And then on some random Monday he got drunk. He called me up in the middle of the night and slurring his words, announced, “It just can’t...and it doesn’t...and it won’t...and we re- ally shouldn’t.”
I went upstairs and collected my things–clothes, shampoos –and I tossed them into two Trader Joe paper bags. I wished him goodbye and good luck and I took off.
Taken aback, I answered coolly, “Well, if that’s how you feel, tomorrow I will come after work and pick up my stuff.”
And I ran. I ran like an Olympic sprinter. I ran like the devil was chasing me with a three-legged fork. I ran like I stole it, two bags of Gone Bananas frozen dessert, the Trader Joe’s employees racing after me, screaming, “She didn’t pay, somebody stop her, somebody call the police.”
He had allocated one drawer for me in his tiny Long Island City apartment. I kept some of my work clothes there for those once-or-twice-a- weekly sleepovers when everything seemed okay in the sensual dimness of evening but it was in the morning light when you were sud- denly seized by a cold front, as if you just swal- lowed an ice cube.
I ran as if God himself...kissed me, and no one could bring me back now. I only hoped that the landscape He threw at my feet, this storybook city humming and whirring ahead, would be kind and good to people like us, in the next round.
He had ironed my dress once, long and black with ruffles, and I thought he would make a wonderful husband, the way he hung it from the ceiling fan, tenderly, carefully, so that it wouldn’t wrinkle. And all night I watched the dress sway from the ceiling fan in the autumnal chill, as
if there was a body inside the dress, a woman hanging from a noose.
Marina Rubin’s work has appeared in over seventy magazines and anthologies including 13th Warrior Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Dos Passos Review, 5AM, Nano Fiction, Coal City, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Jewish Currents, Lillith, Pearl, Poet Lore, Skidrow Penthouse, and The Worcester Review. She is an editor of Mud sh, the Tribeca literary and art magazine. She is a 2013 recipient of the COJECO Blueprint Fellowship. Her fourth book is a collection of ash ction, Stealing Cherries.
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