Interfictions (6 page)

The postal van idles at the curb. “While you're at it,” she says, “would you mind taking my outgoing mail?” There's a postcard she's been meaning to send and a trial subscription to
Working Mom
.

"Be happy to,” says Joe. He hoists her down the driveway and opens the swinging doors at the back of his van.

She squats inside a nest of media mail lining a white plastic tub, one of many white tubs with slots cut out in the sides for easy lifting. Some of the tubs are small and filled with a toss of Number 10 envelopes and some are large enough to hold microwave ovens. On the side of each tub is a modernist silkscreen USPS blue eagle, a reminder there is order in chaos.

Joe takes his seat in front, on the right side, and putt-putts up the street. “Feel free to read magazines,” Joe says. “Just don't tear out recipe cards, or I'll get complaints.” He pauses at the next mailbox, picks up a bundle of mail, and gently taps it home. He drives on. On the floor by his foot sits a copy of
Post Office
by Charles Bukowski.

She pretends she's on her honeymoon, that she and Christopher are walking over warm beach sand, the fine, dry kind that doesn't stick to your skin or get trapped in your butt crack. She breathes into her sleeve to escape the mushroomy odor of newspapers, exhaust, and detergent samples. She is smelling for two, and it stinks.

Joe finishes his route by five. He parks in the post office alley and transfers his white tubs onto a conveyor belt. He stamps Stella's cheek,
Hand Cancel
with red ink. “Oops,” he says, and wets his thumb, rubs small circles across her skin. “Didn't mean to smudge."

"It's okay,” she says, a little embarrassed by the personal attention.

"Got it,” he says, and stops rubbing. “Have a good night."

"I will,” she answers before disappearing behind a rubber flap that separates the natural world from the post office. The echo of footsteps tapping concrete punctuates the buzz of sorting machines that spit out stacks according to zip code. The conveyer belt transports her through the cryptic and industrious night world of the post office. There are no windows and no doors. It's a lot like being on one of those theme park rides, where you're told to keep your hands and arms inside the boat. Stella expects to hear the “It's a Small World” song cycle endlessly until it's a meme she can't get out of her head without deprogramming. She can't find a comfortable position, and in order to lie down in her box she must twist her body like a Möbius strip or her forearms and calves jut out from the sides. The night passes slowly and she considers giving up and going home, but she's too lonely to want to be alone. She watches the clock, counts the seconds. The shift supervisor takes note of her insomnia. “Let's see what we can do,” he says. He unlocks a cabinet, removes a thick roll of plastic, tears off lengths of bubble wrap and cushions her white tub with doubled-over sheets. “Double bubble,” he says.

Memories of that sickly sweet pink chewing gum scent make her want to throw up. Her eyes are so dry the lids won't close without great effort. She's almost too tired to sleep. Her mind is still sorting facts, just not into neat stacks, and it's obvious that her life lacks the zip codes to make everything fall into place.

The night shift supervisor says, “I have an idea,” and covers her tub with another just like it, building a cabin, of sorts, more of a box. The opaque plastic lets in the light, provides privacy and space to sit up. Her cabin is cozy enough, though you're never as comfortable as in your own bed. She dozes, wakes, dozes. In the morning she's processed alongside the rest of the local mail. They date stamp her elbow and cancel her lips. She bonks her forehead against the scanner, but as long as the address is still readable, she's told she's good to go. She's transferred to a crate containing other mail requiring special handling. There's a taxidermy skunk with no return address, a ripe pork sausage—casing ready to burst—with a note that says, “Thinking of you,” an oil-stained cardboard box labeled “Blubber from Alaska.” It's as if they are in this together, a frightening thought.

Joe strolls past, wearing a short-sleeved permanent-press shirt that matches his blue pants. How is it that every man looks good in a uniform unless it's postal? When she met Christopher, he was wearing his Swiss minimalist lifeguard togs: red Speedos, a white whistle on a red cord, a red foam rescue tube with RESCUE printed in large white letters. She'd fallen hard after that first taste of CPR. He'd saved her life, only to ruin it later.

Anonymity is difficult in a small town, impossible on a postal route. Since Christopher lives close, along with all they've shared, they share the same carrier.

"How you doing?” Joe asks. He's a poet, but he never says anything worth remembering.

Her boobs feel lumpy and heavy, like someone filled them with buckshot during the twenty-five minutes she managed to sleep. “Not so great,” she says.

"Sorry to hear it.” Joe transfers the white tubs to his van, leaving hers for last. “You okay with this?” he says, with a nod to the skunk.

She shrugs. “It doesn't smell,” she says. “But thanks."

Her boyfriend's house is near the end of the route. Stella, in her present state especially, won't fit inside the mailbox, so Joe carries her to the door and rings the bell. He gives it a few tries before setting her on the concrete slab porch. “What are we gonna do now?” he asks, but she knows a rhetorical question when she hears it, and sure enough, he takes out form PS 3605-R from his pocket and starts filling out the blanks. The paper is yellow. He copies the zip code and checks a box informing the occupant a parcel awaits pickup.

"Can't you just leave me?"

"Sorry. Someone has to sign to show they've accepted you."

She doesn't protest. She knows about rules, about rigidity. Her mother was a civil servant. Her father, a career soldier. “There's no democracy in bureaucracy,” he told her. When you work for the government, there's nothing to do but bide your time until retirement. So back she goes, back to her padded crate and night workers who couldn't be kinder. They feed her Vanilla Wafers and saltines and let her use the employee bathroom. She feels special, like the post office cat. She waits to be claimed. And waits. Joe brings her a science fiction book called
The Postman
by David Brin, but she's not much of a reader, and sets the book on the counter while she uses the bathroom. By the time she remembers, it's disappeared. She becomes friendly with a sorter named Michelle, whose asthma is exacerbated by the glues used to seal envelopes. Twice, she's sent Stella to the lockers for her inhaler, and Stella has stood by, doting, until the rasp of Michelle's wheezing fades and her breathing comes easier. Stella learns the wisdom of having a friend who is in worse shape than she is.

Michelle has two kids and works night shift while her husband sleeps. She goes home in time to get the children ready for school. Four hours of sleep and then there's after-school activities and cooking. “Not much of a life,” she says. “But it takes two incomes."

After a week, Joe brings disturbing news. “You can't stay,” he says. “You need to go home."

"He's coming,” Stella says. “Just another few days.” She looks at her watch, which makes no sense, not that anything about her life makes sense. She just expects it to.

"Sorry,” Joe says. “Regulations.” He flips through a manual and points to a page, but when she sees the heading
Mail Recovery
, formerly called the Dead Letter Office, Joe says, it makes her sad, and she only pretends to read the words in question, and nod her head. In the morning, he transfers her to his van and when he gets to that place on the route, delivers her to her house, where she's supposed to sign for herself so he can leave her on the porch.

Only she won't do it.

Joe fills out another form, this one chartreuse and marked PS 941-X. “We just had in-service on this,” Joe says. “New form.” They return to the post office to file a report about unaccepted mail. Joe boils water and makes her instant soup. His voice is gentle. “Stay as long as you need,” he says. “You're on my route. Around here, that means something."

"Thank you,” answers Stella. When her calf seizes up and she has to stretch, she's allowed to walk around unsupervised in the storage room, a space that, like the center of the earth, has seen neither fresh air, nor natural light.

"Look where you step,” says an old man sitting next to a shopping cart on a green canvas cot. The shopping cart is filled with lumpy black plastic bags and crushed soda cans. Oil-stained buckets from Kentucky Fried Chicken form a makeshift parapet around his encampment. He smells like sour milk and stale tobacco. A dried maple leaf curls through his hair.

"Do you live here?” she asks.

He shrugs. “Yeah. It's not so bad. I worked here forty years,” he says in a gentle Southern accent. “Service before that."

She does the math and it adds up to Vietnam. Sure enough, he's wearing a black tee shirt under his flak jacket with an evil-eyed golden eagle and gold letters that proclaim, “Remember the POWs."

"What's your name?” she asks.

"Bartleby,” he says. “Like Melville's scrivener. But you can call me Bart."

"Like the Simpsons,” she says, being unfamiliar with either Melville or scrivening. She introduces herself.

"Like Stella Kowalski,” he says. “I once lived on Desire."

"No,” she says. “Not like anyone.” This isn't true. She just doesn't know who she was named for. Maybe if she did, she'd understand better how she'd ended up living in a post office. She sees misshapen figures like shadow puppets fluttering across the back wall. “Do they live here, too?” she asks.

The old man shushes her. “It's best not to mention it. Don't ask, don't tell,” he says, “or they'll make you fill out a squatter's form.” He chuckles at his joke and lies back down, leaving up one hand to guard his cart. “First thing you do,” he says, “you get yourself a cart. Unless you can convince one of the blue shirts to give you a locker."

"I'd prefer a locker,” Stella says.

"I'm kidding. Sorry, little post office humor. I'll ask one of the boys to bring back a cart next time he makes groceries."

Stella wanders out, finds the break room. She'd like a cigarette, but the machine is out of everything except Snickers and Wintermint gum. Her stomach roils. She sits with her head between her legs for fifteen minutes until she's able to stand, then go out and find somebody to talk to. She sees why Bart might like it here.

"Would you like to help sort the outgoing mail?” asks the night supervisor. “Makes the time go faster when you've got something to do.” He finds her a blue uniform she can grow into.

She works an hour or so before seeing her boyfriend's name whisk by, and she pockets that envelope, and though shamed by her felonious act, her shame is not so strong it prevents her from doing this again. And again. In less than a week, she's a serious serial mail thief who lines her tub with Christopher's correspondence. She steals utility payments, his Texaco charge, and his entry to Publisher's Clearinghouse. She lets him pay his telephone bill.

She sleeps from four in the morning until noon, and sometimes manages to sneak in a short afternoon nap, but her slumber is frequently interrupted by vivid dreams that leave her exhausted. Today, for instance, she's dreamt she was a sand crab coming up for air just as an animated Swiss Army Knife—with blades for limbs—dashed away. She's dreamt Bart asked Joe to deliver a postal money order, but Joe said it was against regulations to reveal her zip code. She's dreamt she was about to add her name to Christopher's mailbox, but couldn't find a Sharpie. This last was a waking dream, and her eyelids flutter into consciousness just as Bart asks her something she doesn't quite get. “Could you repeat that?” she must say, and he shuffles away, muttering, “Sorry to interrupt."

She feels bad for him, but also wary. Two days ago, Bart got mad and kicked a man hard enough the man flew out of his shoes. The man was one of the shadow people she's been warned to stay away from. These are very bad people, people who've been caught opening Christmas cards to steal money meant for children. As punishment, they must walk the floors in darkness, pulling heavy bags filled with mail. The bags are locked with heavy metal locks that clank against the chains. The shadow people moan and groan from the weight. It's very creepy. On the night Bart kicked the man hard enough for him to fly out of his shoes, Michelle, Stella's friend in mail sorting, broke up the fight with a cardboard mailing tube, reinforced with quarters from the stamp machine, and told Bart he'd be asked to leave if it happened again.

"It's the veterans who go postal,” Michelle had said. “This one's got a temper you need to watch out for."

So Stella lets him go, feeling bad to have hurt his feelings by being half-asleep. He was married once, but his wife took the children and left him. She knows Bart's had a hard life, and knowing this helps her keep things in perspective, because as bad as things are, they could always be worse. At the back of her mind she holds the hope she'll suffer a miscarriage, fit back in her own clothes, but that seems more and more unlikely once she graduates from the first trimester. She's made a decision by making no decision, not for the first time. Maybe it's her training in a military family, where people tell you what to do.

The night supervisor organizes a pool and swiftly collects over a thousand dollars, half of which goes to her. “I'm betting on February 31,” he says with a wink.

Joe saves out some crafts magazines that can't be forwarded because the subscribers have moved.

Stella learns to knit a scarf with postal twine she finds in the storage room. They don't use it anymore—the fibers get snared in the machines. She knits potholders and a bath mat. Linda, on the cleaning crew, brings her a few skeins of yarn and Stella starts on a yellow and white striped baby blanket. Soon, everyone's bringing in their leftover yarn. She knits compulsively. Wrap. Cast. Purl. She appreciates the smooth touch of the needles, how they clack and tap, the soft bump of the knots beneath her fingers. Knitting produces a tactile bliss that's almost as satisfying as smoking.