The Mercy of Joan

“We’re running out of time,” Joan says, not exactly to me, but there is no one else in the car that she could be speaking to. I do not feel the need to respond.

The digital clock on the dashboard reads 11:32. The red, geometric lines flicker as the clock clumsily readjusts itself, the minutes ticking closer and closer to when we’re supposed to arrive at the party. But Joan and I are not even close. We are on the freeway and traffic is at a standstill. A mass of cars stretches before me like dominos gathering potential energy, waiting for the push of a chubby toddler’s finger to initiate their forward motion. Between golden oldies and 90s R&B, a man on the radio reports that there has been an accident farther up the road. I put the car in park, turn the keys, and the engine sputters off. Joan rolls down the window and peeks her head out to get a better view of the pile-up, though all I can see in the distance are increasingly smaller gray, blue, and red specks, like pills spilling out of a bottle. Fruitless in her attempt to catapult vision beyond the horizon line, she tucks herself back inside the car but leaves the window rolled down. Joan speaks again, and I think maybe I should have replied the first time.

“Helen said if we’re late we’ll miss the slideshow. She said they won’t wait for anyone.” I can’t help but think if this is true, or just something Helen is telling people to enforce punctuality.

“Who cares,” I say, more annoyed with Joan’s desire to abide by social etiquette than Helen’s to orchestrate a successful gathering. “I don’t know why we’re going to this thing anyways. I mean, I’ve barely even spoken to her since high school. Or to any of these people for that matter.” I bend the rearview mirror towards my face and check the makeup so carefully applied earlier this morning. My mascara is not waterproof, and this worries me. I pull a cherry-colored lip gloss out of the middle register and begin applying it. It’s warm in the car, too warm, and the goo spreads easily across my chapped lips, syrupy and sweet.

Joan blows air out of her mouth in an overly obvious display of exasperation. “It’s a high school reunion,” she replies plainly, “We’re going so that you can reunite. Helen used to be your friend if you remember. And she was nice enough to arrange this for everyone, so you better be nice to her.”

Joan is always nice to everyone. I treat people based on my honest opinion of them, leading me to many not-so-nice encounters. This is why Joan is still friends with ‘Helen from high school’ and my only form of communication with her is half-hearted text messages which receive equally half-hearted replies. I am only attending this event at Joan’s request. If it were up to me, I would be staying as far away from these people as possible. But it is not up to me. I am at the mercy of Joan, and she thinks it will be good for me to go. To make amends.

The blue minivan in front of me edges forward slightly, though the long line of cars does not appear to be going anywhere. I can see a set of two children in the far backseat of the van, meaning there’s likely five passengers not including the driver. A cacophony of tiny arms flails about in the backseat. Probably at least four children are inside. I feel a pang of sympathy for the driver who had no way of knowing that fate would lead them here, stuck with a host of impatient tiny humans in a hot car with no means of escape. 

I glance over at the passenger seat to look at Joan. She sits with her head slightly turned towards the window, gazing out at the ocean that lay just beyond the freeway and biting the inside corner of her lip in pensive frustration. Her soft brown hair is twisted lovingly into a soft bun on the back of her head. She looks beautiful and I want to tell her so, but I can feel the annoyance in her faraway gaze so instead I say,

“Joanie, I’ll be nice.” I say this pleadingly and reach over to touch her freckled shoulder. “I swear. I like Helen. It’s some of the other people that I just…” My sentence trails off. I fail to connect my emotions to my words. Joan turns her face to look at me, but I stare instead at the bumper of the minivan, eyebrows furrowed in embittered thought. The car’s license plate is a random jumble of letters and numbers, but for a moment I search for some meaning within them. 

I shove the palms of my hands flat against my eyes and pull the heels back towards my temples, attempting to wipe away the unease clouding my thoughts. “You know how some of those people treated me in high school,” I say. “I know it was just childish teasing, but it took me a long time to accept myself after that.” I forgot momentarily that I am wearing makeup and so I tug the mirror back towards my face to make sure I didn’t rub mascara all over my eyes. The left eye is smudged slightly, a line of black underneath a pool of anxious blue. I rub my pinky underneath it and it fades but does not go away completely.

“I know that Sam,” Joan says. The understanding in her voice is genuine, comforting. “You know that I know that. But they were kids, albeit mean kids, but just kids. I bet a lot of those people have changed in the 25 years since you’ve seen them. Don’t you remember how many people from your high school congratulated you on our engagement post?”

“Sure, it’s easy to post a polite comment online and throw in an emoji of two women holding hands,” I say sourly. “It’s a classic cop-out. They’re just trying to alleviate their own guilt.”

Joan sighs again, more deeply this time, like her lungs truly are in desperate need of air. She is quiet for a minute. “I just don’t know why you have to be so cynical about this,” she finally murmurs. The words sound sad, disappointed in my continued insistence to see the worst in everyone and everything. I look over to her side of the car, but Joan stares out at the expanse of water and avoids my gaze. I hate that my pessimism has a tendency to hurt Joan. She is sensitive and I am brusque, a combination which ends in both parties feeling misunderstood and alienated.

“Check the Facebook page,” I say after a few minutes have passed, trying to mollify the tension that has thickened between us like heat waves rising off black pavement. “I’m sure other people are going to be late because of the traffic. Maybe Helen decided to push it back a bit.”

Joan reaches silently into the soft faux-leather bag sprawled limpidly on her lap and grabs the cell phone inside. I wait while she logs in and hunts down the event information. The minivan children have stuck their feet out of the windows and are now swinging them about gleefully. They likely have never been in standstill traffic on the highway before. This is a new adventure for them, a new perspective through which to view the world.

“There’s nothing on here about pushing the time back.” I am distracted and Joan’s voice startles me. I momentarily forgot that I had asked something of her, and for a second, I feel confused by what I am meant to automatically comprehend. “It does say something about showcasing a special video entry for Ben though. Did you know a Ben? Ben Deluth?”

Ben Deluth. I let the name rattle around in my head for a moment. “Oh yeah,” I say slowly, fiddling around with my memories like putting on a belt, going through the loops and finding the one hole that makes everything fit together. “Sure, I remember him. We weren’t friends or anything. He was alright, very energetic. On student council, I think.” 

I picture a tall gangly kid in a loose-fitting suit, trying to emulate the image of juvenile professionalism. Ben had been an awkward, overly enthusiastic teenager. He was too involved in school to be considered cool, but not book-smart enough to be considered a high-strung academic. Though not necessarily popular, Ben was, for the most part, inoffensive and his position as class president afforded him a certain amount of respect. Maybe respect isn’t the word, but he had the ability to remain on the periphery of disrespect where it otherwise would have been shelled out to a kid like Ben. The girls at school would charm him into picking an Old Hollywood theme for that year's homecoming or flip their hair in his direction so that the senior fundraiser could be a magazine sale instead of a walk-a-thon. He went along with all of it, understanding that this power was the only thing that kept him from enduring torment. I remember something then, a moment where I can recall him most clearly. 

I am standing at my locker, searching through a mess of loose-leaf notebook paper and obnoxiously colored plastic binders. The hallway is faintly musky, the scent of mildewed ceiling tiles and pubescent body odor swirling together in putrid harmony. I hear a girl behind me whisper a sentence that includes my name. “Sam.” It makes me shudder. Whisper is a strong word for the girl’s tone. She knows I am standing here. She wants me to hear what she is saying. I shove my head further inside the blue metal cavern, thinking that if I can make myself small enough, I might be able to fit inside. 

“It’s true. I heard it from Jenna, they’re in gym class together. She said that Sam totally stares at other girls in the locker room while they’re changing.”

“That’s vile!” A second girl’s voice chimes in here, shriller than the other. 

I never turned around. I do not know who either of the girls were. I’m sure I must have recognized their voices at the time, but so many years have passed. My tormentors have taken many shapes since then. Bosses, gas station clerks, family members, dog walkers passing by the front porch, appalled to see my wife and I sitting hand-in-hand in the comfort of our own home. I prefer to think of them all as amorphous blobs, their voices coming seemingly from nowhere, from nothing.

“Trust me, I know,” the first girl replies, as if it would be impossible not to hold this same belief. “It’s so uncomfortable that she’s just… here. They should have a separate school for people like that so they’re not disturbing everyone else.” The girl has gotten increasingly louder. She speaks the last sentence directly into my back. It is a knife that stabs into my gut, and I shut my eyes, hard, until I can hear the clammer of shoes fade down the length of the hallway. I stand for a moment, completely still, before I can gather the strength to open them again. When I do, I look over to the left and Ben is standing there, looking at me. We stare at each other for a few, drawn out moments. I think he is going to say something, but he just continues to look at me, his eyes filled with an emotion I can’t quite discern. For a moment I think it’s pity, and the red-hot burn of anger rises in my chest. Being pitied almost feels worse than being hated. But then, Ben smiles. The most unassuming half-smile, pulling up just slightly on the left side of his mouth and lifting his eyebrows as if to say, “What are ya gonna do?” Then he spins on the heel of his brown, beat-up loafer and walks away. I picture Ben’s posture, his gait, the way he moved as if he hadn’t yet figured out what to do with the body he had been given.

That’s the only time I ever remember being in his presence, but it was nice, familiar. We had some unspoken understanding that this was not where we belonged. We were meant to be somewhere beyond those walls, not together, but in a space completely separate from the one we were confined to. I thought of Ben now, his body having grown too large to fit the suit which used to hang on him in an almost cartoonish way, the buttons buckling over his now commanding frame, smiling the same sweet smile.

Joan can tell I was lost in thought, and she is focusing on me now, an expectant boss waiting for me to report on my findings. “He was nice,” I say. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t remember very well. Why’s he getting a special dedication? Did he get elected to the Senate or something?” I joke, almost convincingly enough. It isn’t a good joke, but I hope it will keep Joan from noticing the defensive tone hiding just below the surface of my words.

A look of relief passes almost imperceptibly across Joan’s face before she redirects her gaze back to the phone screen. “Well, in this case I guess I’m glad you two weren’t close. It says here that Ben got diagnosed with prostate cancer almost a year ago. Apparently the doctors caught it too late. He passed a few months ago. Oh man, he had a wife and two young daughters. How horrible.”

Hearing this does not shock me, it does not make tears well in my eyes. It does, however, make my hands grip the plastic of the steering wheel, as if I’m falling and need to grab on to something solid. “Oh, huh,” is all I can manage to say. I can feel my heart thump combatively against my chest and I take a deep breath in through my nose. Both actions make me feel guilty. Joan asks if I want to see the picture of him with his family and I say no, thanks. I think of seeing him sick and frail. I like the picture I have of Ben in my head already.

I see the line of traffic begin to move, people slowly but surely inching towards their destinations. The children in the minivan throw something back and forth between them, apparently having gotten bored with the excitement of stalled cars and needing something else with which to entertain themselves. 

“Well, I guess the accident has been cleared,” Joan says, pushing herself up in her seat slightly. I don’t know when she set her cellphone down. “Traffic should be letting up in a second. I’ll let Helen know that we’re moving.” 

I look at the glaring red numbers on the dashboard again. They read 11:58. The slideshow is starting any moment, and we will not be there in time to see it. I am thankful for this. But then I think about being thankful for a car accident, and I get confused. We are, however, as Joan said, moving. So, I do the only thing that makes sense. I turn the car back on, take it out of park, put my foot on the gas pedal, and drive forward.