Vertigo

RELATIVITY

I am sitting here on the bus when I begin to wonder how it is my clothes have grown neater than my daughter’s.

We are sitting at the front of the bus. My daughter did not want to, but I wanted to see out. The bus is driving toward the sunset. The driver pulls down a black plastic sunshade across the whole front window in which there is an open frame. The road ahead passes like a movie.

My pose is informal, legs folded under me on the seat, but I remain neat. However I try to shake this neatness, I cannot. I realize it is the neatness of my mother, who we are traveling to see.

My daughter, who has just become a teenager, sleeps on my shoulder. What I had she has now. Maybe.

I wear tight clothes, but tight clothes make me neater. If I wear loose clothes, my body flows out and pushes against them.

My daughter wears tight clothes too, but they do not contain her. She has not learned yet how they can. Does she already feel the discomfort of her thighs spreading in her sausage jeans? Doesn’t she already know it’s wrong to have legs that look like this?

I lift mine and cross them.

They look better. But, still, I look neat.

Among other middle-aged women I don’t look too neat, and this pleases me.

I am dressed for, what? For anything that might happen to me: keep it coming! I’ve learned that it does. I am dressed for things that are not. I am not too sexy, not too casual, not too unassumingly unassuming. I do not look like I have made an effort, but I do look like I might have made an effort to look like I have not made an effort, which is only polite. And I will not fall over if required to run in my shoes.

My daughter is dressed for one of the many occasions she imagines could happen to her in tight jeans, bangles, a lace scarf, and a t-shirt with a picture of a fashion model that says, WE GOT THE LOOK. I dressed like that once: hoop earrings, off-the-shoulder sweatshirt, leggings.

I cannot drive so we must take the bus between cities. The bus takes us through the outsides of cities, through yellow new estates of family-shaped houses. The people there have jobs you could put in a children’s book. I’d always hoped to end up in one of these places where no one has ever been old.

The bus takes us through the market towns where the old people live, and where the property is prettier and less expensive than in the city we have left, or the city we are traveling to. Once I would have wanted to explore each shop on each high street, to discover local features even in the chain stores. I’d have wanted especially to investigate the charity shops, knowing that, among the second-hand pleated skirts and polyester blouses I would find … what? I would have visited once a week, twice, perhaps every lunch break from my children’s book job, before I went home to my house on the new estate on the frayed outskirts of town. I would have visited the shops inconspicuously. I would not have talked to the women behind the tills. They would not have known where I came from. Each time I arrived, they would have beamed at a fresh customer.

I would buy nothing, but I would not lose hope.

As it is I have packed wrongly. I know that now. I should have brought tights (it’s cold). I should not have brought the new trousers that don’t fit. I didn’t bring anything else.

The bus enters a large town (or a small city) scattered with sponge-on-stick model trees. Sunset: the trees blur at the edges, change color. From a distance they are solid, square: from close up, a net of branches.

The driver pulls up the shade with the plastic window revealing the whole road ahead, the game of framing gone. And my daughter, who has been sleeping on my shoulder, wakes up. She shifts and — vast, monumental in sleep — becomes tiny in movement.

I can see my mother and father waiting at the bus stop. They are very small. My mother is wearing a pastel blouse and pastel slacks and pastel canvas shoes. Her shades are mint, peach, lemon, blueberry, cream. She is dressed as she would like to see her granddaughter dressed: edibly. Still she looks formal, arranged, neat. She cannot shake it.

I cannot hear what she says to my father. She says, “Forty-five, and she still has to take the bus.”

The bus stops and out get the sort of people who travel by bus between cities: students, old people — mainly women — and the middle-aged who cannot afford the train and who have never grown old enough to drive. Out we get, and away we go, the young, the old, and the failed girls.