Window Pains

A girl was sitting in a booth at a diner, staring out the window, watching the rain droplets run down the glass in random zigzag patterns. Bags hung under her watery eyes. Tears streaked down her face just like the rain on the windows. She was quite pretty except for her bloodshot eyes that were puffy from the tears. Her long brown hair was ratted but was usually dune up in beautiful curls that framed her round face. She was a petite girl and was often mistaken for being younger than she really was. A young man, a couple years older than her, at 26, walked to the table carrying two cups of coffee. He walked slowly holding the cups at arms length so if he did spill, it wouldn’t get his clothes stained. He was clumsy at times and always stained his clothes. He was much bigger than the girl. She would barely make it to his shoulders when they stood side by side and his frame was much broader. He always stayed in shape. He told the girl before that he had to exercise so he didn’t lose his head. As he set the cups down the girl quickly wiped her tears away and hoped he didn’t notice she was crying.
“I made yours with cream and two sugars, just how you like it.” The man waited for some response before he sat down but she didn’t say a word. After a moment without any reply, the man sat down with a sigh. He sat, watching her look out the window for a few minutes before he attempted to break their silence again.
“Thanks for meeting me here on my lunch break; I know you didn’t want to go out today, but we really need to talk.”
She slowly turned her head to him, took a sip out of the cup and gently set it down on a small napkin. The corners of her lips quivered as she tried to smile, just a small one. A smile would have shown that everything was all right. The smile wouldn’t come though. She couldn’t smile, at least not anymore. She didn’t feel it in her heart to smile. She ran her index finger around the rim of her cup as she finally replied. “What is there to talk about; isn’t everything fine?”
She shifted around on the glittery red plastic of the booth. She slowly peeled one leg off the warm sticky seat only for it to adhere once more when she tried to free her other leg. It was a sick game where she couldn’t be completely free. She couldn’t get away. She would have loved to run and hide so she wouldn’t have to talk about complicated issues, but she was stuck. Damn those sticky red diner seats. She tried to make it sound like nothing in the world was wrong, but the truth was nothing in her world was right. Pretending everything was fine wasn’t working; it just caused more pain, more pain for her and those around her. She didn’t know how long she would be able to carry one the charade. She wasn’t doing a very good job at it so far. The man could see right through it. He kept telling her, too.
He should have been mad with her response, anyone would have been, but this wasn’t a time for anger. She would just recoil herself even more. He suppressed his anger and stared at her with soft caring eyes. He reached for her hand and started to gently caress it in his, but she wouldn’t let him. She played around with the steam from her coffee just to keep her hands away from his. The steam flowed between her fingers as she tried to shape the path it took up in the air. She didn’t want to be confronted. She wanted to sit and feel sorry for herself. She didn’t want help; she could take care of herself. She wished she could just be left alone. Nothing bothered her more than the persistent pressure people put on her to talk about her feelings. If she wanted to share them she would. It was easier for her to keep them all locked up inside her. Why wouldn’t he just let her be? The man sighed at the rejection. “You know what I am talking about. You need to talk about whatever is bothering you. I just don’t know what it is. You haven’t been yourself these last three days. I’m pretty sure this is the first time you’ve been out of the house since Tuesday. You haven’t even changed your clothes, have you?”
“Nothing is wrong. I’m fine.”
“I’m not stupid. I can tell when something is bothering my wife. I want to take care of you. Why won’t you let me?”
“I would if there was something to take care of, but there isn’t. I am fine. Besides, sometimes I like to take care of myself.”
“Fine we don’t have to talk then. We can just sit here and not say anything.” The man slumped back against the booth. It would be so much easier for the both of them if she would just say what was bothering her. Then he could take care of all her problems instead of making her mad by asking if she was all right all the time. He could never tell if she was telling the truth anymore, and she knew it. There was a time back when they were a new young couple that they were both always happy. Now it seems she is never pleased with him and there is no way for him to fix that. He just stared at her. His face was sad and his eyes were watery. He hid his tears better than the girl did. She had to keep rubbing her face in an attempt to hide the ones on her streaky cheeks. She just sat starring out the window at the water drops. She watched as they connected with other drops and went faster and faster. She thought her problems seemed to do that too. She wished someone would just come by with some kind of giant squeegee and wipe away all of her difficulties.
There they sat; the girl and the young man. Neither of them dropped their gaze. The steam had stopped rising from their coffee cups. The girl’s hand had resorted to tearing the corners of the little napkin into small pieces. She swept them into a tiny pile and moved it around the table. And distraction was welcomed into her life now. She didn’t want to think about anything important. She longed for a chance to think about those petty problems. She couldn’t even remember what kinds of problems were petty. They all seemed too big for her to deal with.
The man interrupted her thoughts. “We might as well get going. We aren’t accomplishing much here. We aren’t even talking to one another.” The young man gave up his crusade. He would try again later, he always did. They both got up and walked to the door. It was still raining. Trying to be helpful the man held her coat for her to slide into but instead she just grabbed it from his hands and put it on herself. “At least let me get you a cab. You shouldn’t walk in the rain like this.”
“I want to walk. I like the rain.”
He held the door for her. She couldn’t turn that down if she wanted to get out of the building. There was no way out of it. She knew that and just walked through without saying anything. Standing outside the small diner, he asked her again if she was all right and she again insisted that she was. “Why do you deny that something is wrong? It is so obvious. You never act like this.”
“Nothing is wrong. You need to get back to work, don’t you?”
“Yeah, will you be all right walking home by yourself from here?”
“Of course, I walked here myself.” With that she walked off without even saying goodbye. She didn’t want to be so awful but she couldn’t bring herself to leave herself vulnerable.
He called after her, “I love you. I’ll see you when I get off work.” She just threw one hand up, without looking back. She thought about looking back but she knew that would hurt too much. She couldn’t stand to see the painful look on his face. She did love him.
At home the girl just plopped face first on the dirty little couch in their small dark apartment. She hadn’t even taken off her soggy raincoat. She thought back to when they got that couch. They had found the stained green couch sitting on the curb while driving through his old college town. They needed a couch and couldn’t expect great quality for free. That was all they could afford. They were both young and just out of college. He hadn’t even found a job yet. That was taking longer than he had expected. If they knew it would take so long they might have waited a little longer to get married. That couch would just have to do until they could afford a nice one. As for the apartment, it wasn’t too bad except for the paint peeling off the walls, the cracks in the ceiling and the window that wouldn’t close all the way. Not to mention the lady who owned it before them also owned cats, lots of cats. She couldn’t help but cry. They were so happy then, when they didn’t care about money, just as long as they were together. She thought of how things were now. She knew something; something that was tearing her up inside. She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t tell her husband because he was part of the problem, and of course it was no petty problem. None of them were anymore. He was the only one who seemed to care that something was even wrong. She couldn’t understand how life could keep going after what had happened. It seemed to her that life should be at a standstill. Why wouldn’t it stop for her?
Ever since she opened that envelope her life had been flipped over. She knew something was wrong long before the envelope, but she didn’t want to believe it. She should have paid closer attention to the signs, or at least not brushed them off so easily. He always seemed to have excuses to stay late at work or miss important occasions with her. He often had stains on his clothes. He said they were from dinner at work but she doubted that because there were so many extra late nights.
Three days earlier, she had found that envelope with her name scrawled across it, under her windshield wiper when she got out of work. There was a small note inside along with some pictures of her husband and her sister. The pictures showed that her husband wasn’t lying about the dinners but they sure weren’t for work. They seemed so happy to be together in the pictures. Whenever she went out to dinner with him she worried about the money. They shouldn’t spend so much on fun things when they could save and move somewhere nice. She would have loved to move someplace where she wouldn’t have to wake up to a police siren or a car alarm. He must have spent some good money on the dinners in those pictures. They could have used that money. She couldn’t believe that he would use that money when he knew how much she wanted to save up. The note was from her nosey neighbor from across the hall. That old lady had nothing better to do than to meddle in their lives. The note told of all those times when he should have been home with her. The two people she loved most had gone behind her back and violated her trust in the most diabolical way. She couldn’t believe it. Affairs are bad enough, but with her sister. That seemed a thousand times worse. Sisters are supposed to have a deeper level of trust. If she couldn’t trust her sister, who could she trust?
Maybe she never could trust her sister. She remembered back in their high school days when a boy called and asked her to her first dance. He was a senior and she was only a sophomore. She was so excited. She thought her sister was happy for her too. Her sister acted as though she was at first. The next day at school the girl walked out of her second hour just in time to see her sister kissing the boy that had called and asked her. She screamed and pushed them apart. The boy said that it was just a little mistake. He thought he was talking to the sister on the phone. He didn’t even know they were sisters. He was laughing all the wile he said it, like it was some kind of funny thing that happens all the time. Her sister was laughing too. She had known the call was for her the whole time. Why did she ever start trusting her sister again?
The phone rang and forced her to stop crying. She didn’t answer it; she let the machine pick it up instead. She just wanted to know who it was; she didn’t feel like talking. She listened to the message. “Hey, Sis. Why haven’t I heard from you in the last couple days? I was wondering if you were all right. You usually call everyday after dinner. I guess you are out or something now. I’ll try back later. Call me, I miss hearing from you. Love you lots, bye.”
The message sounded so innocent, unlike those pictures. It was amazing how the two of them could carry on as though nothing was going on between them. They hid it so well. Her husband noticed right away when she even talked to a guy, even if he wasn’t there. Se couldn’t hide it at all. She felt so horrible afterwards. The two most important people in her life were also the two she now hated the most. She had no one to turn to, so she turned inside herself. She had to try and pretend nothing was wrong until she could figure out what to do. She couldn’t confront them. What would she say? They would just deny it and have some kind of excuse for the pictures. Nothing would be the same again if she confronted them. Not that it was the same now, at least for her. She couldn’t even go to the rest of her family for support. They were against their marriage. Her sister was the only one that supported her at that time. Her family told her she was too young and inexperienced. She wasn’t nearly grown up enough for that kind of life change and commitment. They said she doesn’t know what love is, and he couldn’t support her the way she needed. She didn’t listen. She knew she loved him and promised her family everything would work out. She was positive. He had a job lined up and everything. How was she supposed to know it would fall through and she would be stuck in this hellhole of an apartment? She knew everything wasn’t going as they had planned but she never would have thought this would happen. She couldn’t tell anyone because then she would have to admit she was wrong. She had lost her family and husband; she wasn’t about to lose the small dignity she thought she had left by doing that.
She just sat on the couch. The lights were all off. The television was off. She was just sitting in the dark and listening to the rain on the windows. He was going to be home soon. She decided what she had to do. She just hoped she had enough courage to pull it off.
She stood in the dark shadows of the street, with only an old newspaper to cover her head. Her husband was walking on the sidewalk. He stopped outside the door and shook off his umbrella before going into the apartment building. He had a bouquet of gas station roses. He only bought her flowers from the gas station even though they were always brown around the edges. This bouquet had a rose with a broken stem so that it hung away from the rest of the flowers. She kept watching him through the window as he walked through the apartment door. She could only see his blurred figure move through the rooms. It had begun to rain harder and the rain running down the window looked more like a waterfall. After going in and out of each room she saw him come back to the kitchen. She backed away from the window so he couldn’t see her in the dark and she continued to watch him. He put the roses in a vase and set them on the table. He noticed an envelope on the table and picked it up. When he saw what was inside he dropped them to the ground. He ran out of her sight into their bedroom. She went to the next window and saw him lying on the bed. His face was buried in the pillows but she knew he was crying. Watching him was becoming too much for her. The more she watched him the harder it was to leave, so she just picked up her suitcase and started to walk down the street. There was no one out except for her. The only sound that could be heard was the rain bouncing off the windows of the buildings.