© 2017 Cynthia W. Gentry. This story was first published in Area I, Spring/Summer 2001.
Carrie has always been fascinated by maps. She likes finding places she’s been; she likes thinking about the places she might go. A map reduces a three-dimensional, living, breathing landscape to a pretty cartoon-color surface. Whole cities boil down to dots: bigger dots for bigger cities, pinpricks for towns. Hairpin roads become innocent wavy lines. Bad neighborhoods become orderly numbered blocks. She can look at a map for five minutes and know exactly where she is going.
Her husband, David, does not share her love of maps, nor does he appear to have any perceptible sense of direction. When she is in the car with him, he completely shuts off whatever internal compass he might have while alone and depends on her to lead them onto the freeway and deliver them from evil. This makes her very angry. At the moment, they are driving to her ten-year college reunion and are lost somewhere south of Market Street. Carrie thought she knew her way, but in San Francisco you always think you know where you are because all the streets sound familiar. Her husband tries to read the map as she heads further in what she is sure is the wrong direction. She snaps at him, which is a mistake, because their best friends are sitting in the back seat and she has thus broken a cardinal rule of marriage: never berate your spouse in front of other people. So he can’t read maps. Big deal. She is forced to apologize, and he gets back at her by chewing gum through the whole reunion.
What she is really mad about is that she has to drive at all. She had wanted about six more margaritas at dinner to prepare herself for this event. Last time she had seen most of these people, she was twenty pounds heavier. Now she is thin and blonde, which has changed her life in what she finds to be astonishing ways, such as, men now look at her, when she is the same person she always was, too tall and too smart and too sensitive (this according to most of her friends and family). To combat her astonishment and brace herself for this evening, she has donned fuck-me pumps and a tight black cocktail dress that actually makes her look like she has cleavage. She doesn’t want to be driving; she wants to be drinking. She needs a few belts of tequila, and now that she can’t have them, she roils with resentment and panic.
A week after the reunion (where people looked at her as if she was a stranger while her husband sat in a corner), she has dinner with Carl, the man she is considering taking as her lover. It turns out that Carl has no more sense of direction than her husband. She has to tell him how to get to the restaurant where they are having dinner, and tell him which way to turn at every stoplight. This annoys her. She wants him to know where they are going: she wants to be driven. She wants to sit back and let someone else make the turns, for God’s sake. Carl wears a red t-shirt and blue jeans and has adopted the mannerisms of a man twenty years younger. Every other word is “cool.” At dinner, she thinks she will have to explain to him which fork to use.
But then Carl returns home in Colorado Springs and seems to change his mind about her, rendering the question of whether or not Carrie wants him to be her lover a moot point. Before he’d come to see her, he sent her daily e-mails asking her what she would do if he fell in love with her and whether she would run away with him. I don’t know, she replied; and then amended it: don’t, and no. He answered that he liked her first reply better.
Now that he is back in Colorado, his e-mails to her announce that his firm-butted 23-year-old physical therapist girlfriend has moved in with him and that they’ll be married within a year because she’s agreed to have an open marriage. Carrie couldn’t compete with that even if she were free. She has never had a firm butt, even when she was 23. And she thinks the idea of an open marriage is pretty damn loony, especially coming from a man who got suicidal when his last “open” marriage broke up after his wife fell in love with another man.
To hell with him. She has already forgotten his voice, she can’t remember the color of his eyes, and before long she’ll forget what it felt like when he pulled her into his hotel room and kissed her. (OK: it felt weird and too fast and she made him stop.) She’ll forget that when she hugged him she noticed he had love handles; she’ll forget his smooth flushed skin and how he didn’t have any lines around his eyes, and she’ll forget that he wouldn’t make love to her.
She knows that she looks for clues about people: the little twists that will give her some direction, that will show her where to turn. But it seems that other people read her first. When Carl and she sat on the balcony of his hotel room, smoking a joint before dinner, he asked to look at her class ring, and as his fingers touched her hand, she wondered how they’d feel on her body. She noticed that his fingernails were wide and wedge-shaped, pink, and the ends looked ragged, as though he chewed them. And he took her other hand in his and turned it over and caressed the ring on that hand, until finally she told him, That’s a wedding ring. And he said, I know, although she couldn’t see his eyes behind his aviator sunglasses. But she saw his smile, and his teeth, and she knew he knew he had her. Until, of course, she found her way out.
What would a map of her heart look like? she wonders now. Would the big events show up in color, a big circle with maybe another circle inside it, like a state capital? Would the insignificant bits be barely visible, but connected to the big dots by a wavy line? At the moment, she thinks it would look like a war zone: normal and pretty on paper, but fucked up when you got down to reality.
This is how it will be for her, she thinks. Life, reduced.
