By Joan Connor

Maybe wrinkles crimp the corners of her eyes, star-shaped like the feet of an opossum, and maybe she has crinkly hair like ramen noodles without the broth, eyes like empty lockets.  Maybe she walks with the grace of a claw-footed bathtub, as obsolete as a phone booth or a mailbox, as she works the breakfast counter of the Eggery in this little ski town, the Eggery which used to be Walter Pierre’s where she worked the morning hours beginning at five a.m. as the graveyard shift men used to stumble in from the G.E. plant across the street and where once a drunk jumped the counter and chased her down its length until Walter grabbed him.

But she was younger then, still beautiful. Once a couple of college boys came in. As she poured their coffee, they discussed her plight as if she were deaf, not even minimum wage, working for tips, criminal really—as if there were tips at Walter Pierre’s before this little ski town became a ski town. The only tip she recalls ever coming from the car salesman who always ordered an English with peanut butter and left her a dime. Always the same—an English muffin and coffee. Back when coffee was still coffee and not aspiring to be a milkshake. The college boys drank cup after cup, discussing her as if she were a homework assignment in their Economics class somewhere at one of those haughty colleges nearby.

Economics. Back then a dime bought something. Not much but something, a phone call at least. And those college boys presuming to know her, assuming about her–they didn’t know this was just a summer job among other summer jobs as she worked her way through Economics class (the actual version, the prerequisite for life) to pay for college. Which maybe made it more humiliating. Her first summer job at the Big N, she waited tables in the cafeteria in a college town far from this little ski town, where the manager taught her how to water the catsup, how to scoop hollow balls of ice cream. How much money could that really save?  Pennies? Surely not dimes, even when dimes meant something. That was part of her education too—how to cheat people. But you cannot cheat time. Now there were no Big N’s or Ameses, or Caldors. It was all Walmart. If she stood still for just a flicker, the universe would be Walmart and even then not for long. That was how time worked.

You are no longer what you will become or you are what you will become, time arrested or not, just an inky fluid moving with or without you.

Outlook not so good

Cannot predict now

When she was younger, she believed in future tense, she believed in her daily horoscope, fortune tellers, card readers, dice throwers. So much to look forward to. This will happen. But no one ever went to a psychic to foresee she would marry a sheet-rocker (the best French Canadian sheet-rocker in the state, as he used to say), have two kids—which brought its own sort of joy maybe. But still. Her husband, gone now, but who for years would happily read his blood tests like he had achieved something, like he had crammed for his HDL, his LDL. Nonetheless, heart attack. And, yes, she loved him. She loved him like she loved her kids.

Her kids, scattered now—like her thoughts, like her hair. Scattershot like the days eventually comprising a life, a life a scatteration of minutes. When you are running out of future, a fortune teller doesn’t pertain. And looking back, she knows the Magic 8 Ball never really tells you anything useful, even something time-worn like “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Like “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.” Once, when she still had a future, she kept a Magic 8 Ball on her desk, back when she was still teaching, back when she had questions like: will we buy a house, will my son make the team, will my daughter make honor roll.

Maybe she always knew the Magic 8 Ball was useless, that it could never warn her you will end your days working at the Eggery which once was Walter Pierre’s, that even randomness might have a pattern, that maybe twenty answers on twenty faces floating in inky alcohol are all the answers you really need as you bump up spang against the edge of time.

Maybe

Signs point to yes