Sunburn: A Novel(13)

She picks up milk, a carton of eggs, and, with a quick look over her shoulder, a bag of off-brand chips, then pays with a card. Probably a welfare card, loaded with her food stamp benefits. That’s the reason for the nervous look. She thinks someone is going to bust her for buying chips. Allowed, under the rules, but taxpayers always think they have the right to look over a welfare recipient’s shoulder, dictate her choices.

All the while, the older boy is whining, Can I have, can I have, can I have? It’s like a high-pitched saw at a construction site.

“I wan’ treat, too,” the younger boy says.

“I’ll share my chips.”

The older child: “I don’t like those chips. Too spicy.”

Polly can almost feel the woman’s palm itch with the desire to slap him.

Polly was on welfare once. Very briefly. And very fraudulently, as she claimed a child she didn’t have. It was a risk, doing that. But she was stuck. She needed money to start a new life, so she borrowed a few things from another life—a name, a birth certificate, a daughter.

Daughter. She should get another card to Jani, but it’s tricky, finding someone to mail it, someone westward bound, with a soft heart and no curiosity about the woman who doesn’t want a Belleville postmark on her letters.

Her fake daughter and real name had been enough to get temporary benefits from an emergency fund at the county level. She learned about food pantries, even took the bus to the occasional soup kitchen. Every dollar she could get her hands on, she had to use to put some kind of roof over her head—a room in someone else’s row house, strictly cash. She had the good sense to settle in Baltimore County, although at the north end, and shopped around until she found a male social worker. He got her into a motel that was taking homeless families, never asked to see the daughter she claimed to have, not even the one night he came to “check on her” and brought a bottle of white zinfandel.

Then she went to Legal Aid, where she told the truth straight up, and that was good enough to get her the name change she needed. She kept it simple, going from Pauline Ditmars to Pauline Smith, and then Pauline Smith became Pauline Hansen when she married Gregg. But she had been Polly as a kid, so it’s no stretch, answering to that again. She had thought about changing her name to Pollyanna, thought about using it again when Adam Bosk first asked her name. A little in-joke because she’s pretty much the opposite of Pollyanna at this point.

But a Pollyanna calls attention to herself, whereas a Pauline doesn’t. The point of becoming Pauline Smith four years ago was to disappear and start over.

So why was she in that bar, Wagner’s, the night she met Gregg? It was within walking distance of the motel, no more than a mile or two, although that strip of Joppa Road wasn’t very friendly to pedestrians. Dark, with cracked sidewalks leading past stores with dusty windows, places that sell things like blinds and suitcases and tile. She wasn’t officially Pauline Smith yet, but she was on her way, trying the name out in anticipation of the day the paperwork came through. Still, it was dangerous to go to that bar. She could have been spotted by someone who knew her well enough not to be fooled by the red hair, long as it was by then. She couldn’t have long hair when she was married to Ditmars. Too much like a leash, too easy to grab.

Gregg was very ordinary trouble at least. Fun, at first. She didn’t expect to see him again after that first night—and maybe she wouldn’t have if she hadn’t gone back to Wagner’s two nights later. Of course, she could never take him to the motel, she saw that right away. And she didn’t have a phone. She told him that when he asked and he laughed, thinking she was making a joke. “I don’t,” she said. “Give me your number and I promise I’ll call you.” She made good on her promise seventy-two hours later, calling from a pay phone outside the Bel-Loc Diner. When he asked her out for a real date, she told him that she worked at the mall and he could pick her up in the food court. They went to a movie, had pizza. Then came the question she dreaded: “Can I take you home?”

“Take me for a drive,” she said. “Out into the country.”

Fifteen minutes later, she asked him to pull into the deserted parking lot outside a greenhouse, led him into a copse of trees. He actually believed that this was her thing, that she didn’t want to make love in a bed, hardly ever. All summer long, they did it outdoors and when fall came and her new identity was under way and she could get a for-real job—waitressing, at a decent place, a Crab Imperial kind of place with fat tips, although the cab fare ate up too much of her earnings for the job to be practical—she started taking him into bathrooms and, once, the dressing room at Nordstrom. Sometimes they used his bed, at his crummy apartment over on Loch Raven, but the pilled sheets, even when clean, felt itchy.

She put a deposit down on a sweet little place over the city line, near Belvedere Square. It was an old Victorian cut up into apartments, so the appliances were half-assed and the closets tiny, but she didn’t mind. It was hers, the first place that had ever been hers. Still, she wouldn’t have sex with Gregg there. Force of habit, she guessed, although maybe there was something deeper going on, some part of her mind trying to tell her that her new life was here and it was time to leave Gregg behind, the last station on her journey to becoming Pauline Smith.

Then she peed on a stick and her life was over. Again.

She had misread him, badly. She believed him when he said he wanted their child. She told herself she had to stop thinking that every man was Ditmars, acted like Ditmars, thought like Ditmars. But maybe they were. She remembers when Gregg spanked her the first time. She went numb, limp, terrified that she was going to do something crazy. But then it turned out that was all he wanted, just a few light slaps, nothing more. She still wants to laugh when she remembers his face when she asked if he wanted a few whacks. That was something to behold. This gander wanted no sauce, but he had to take it or be exposed for the bully he was.