The night Shelly had come across the accident, she had been on her way home from the gym. It was the Ides of March. All day, a watery sun had been trying to creep out from behind the same sloppy, gray, and borderless cloud until finally, giving up, it just sank into the horizon. Of course, then it cleared, and hard little stars blinked on one by one as the sky grew darker, and a huge round moon rose over everything, tremendously bright, as if it had somehow managed to finally push the sun out of the sky.
Et tu, Brute?
It had seemed unfair that it had been such a cloudy dark day, only to be such a crystal clear night. By mid-March, Shelly was always weary of winter and its continuing, small injustices. She wanted spring.
Her arms and back ached. She’d overdone it again. Every night before she stepped foot in the gym, she told herself she wouldn’t overdo it, and then she’d start hauling the heaviest weights she could lift off the rack and over to the bench.
Why?
She wasn’t trying to impress the men, and there were almost never any women in the free weights corner of the gym.
She was, she supposed, trying to impress her own reflection in the mirror.
Often, she did.
Shelly was five feet, five inches tall and weighed a hundred and fifteen pounds, but when she yanked those forty-pound dumbbells off the floor, you could have counted the sinews in her biceps and triceps. You could have sketched the grainy fibers. She was a forty-eight-year-old woman made of muscle. “Whoa,” some guy would almost always say from the other side of the weight rack. “You a bodybuilder, or trying to scare somebody?”
Usually, Shelly said nothing in response, but once she said, trying to make it sound like a joke, “I have a past.”
She had sounded serious. The guy who’d been joking with her looked away, but a leering teenager on her other side said, “I bet you do.”
Shelly knew she looked her age, but that she also looked good. Her stomach was flat. Her legs were lean. Her skin was smooth and pale. Her hair was long and strawberry blonde. Boys like this one—chiseled body, face full of acne—had been staring at her body her whole life, although, these days, the older men left her alone. More experienced, probably they smelled it on her.
Lesbian.
She didn’t do men.
She wished she never had. She still had a scar that ran straight from her collarbone down to her hipbone, left over from the great heterosexual mistake of her life, and the last one of those she’d ever make.
Not that she was doing very well with women, either. The last woman she’d dated for more than a few weeks had moved to Arizona with the life partner she’d never bothered to tell Shelly she had.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Rosemary had said. But Rosemary had three teenage sons and a dashing brain-surgeon husband. It was easy for her to cast people out of Shelly’s life without a backward glance. Except to go to work, Shelly herself had hardly left the house for a month after the break-up.
And now, to top off a whole lifetime of sexual misadventures, it seemed that early menopause had arrived. A few weeks earlier, she had found herself stripping off her jacket and sweater in the checkout line of the grocery store. Dripping, panting. What the hell? Had they turned the heat up to three hundred degrees? Was the place on fire? She had a sudden nauseating memory of being placed by some beautician under a steaming plastic hood in a sweltering hair salon as a child, and being told to sit still as it poured stinking air from a hundred little holes onto her hair and the chemicals burned their way into the skin on her scalp.
“Jesus,” Shelly said in the grocery store, and the woman at the cash register said in a cigarette-husky Midwestern drawl, “Yer havin’ a hot flash darlin’. Ain’t ya ever had a hot flash before?”
No. She most certainly had not. But now she had one every other day. “Oh,” her doctor had said, “this is a little early, but might as well get it over with, right?” Shelly wondered if he’d say this to her someday when she came to him with a terminal illness.
Up ahead, someone seemed to be swerving around. Shelly rubbed her left bicep with her right hand, holding the steering wheel with her left, and then changed biceps and hands.
She was solid. She was aching, but her arms were hard as rock. She was singing along with the radio. A country song about staying loyal to the U.S. of A. If you didn’t like it here, you could leave, the lyrics twanged—and Shelly’s brother’s black-and-white high school yearbook picture floated up out of the ten billion images in her unconscious.
He was smiling, getting ready to die in Vietnam.
Ahead, the red brake lights of the meandering vehicle seemed to be making elliptical dashes across the centerline, into the shoulder, back into the right lane, back over the yellow line. Kids, screwing around. Or a defensive driver avoiding something in the road. Too far ahead to worry too much about. Shelly was still singing along to the radio as she still rubbed her aching muscles. She was thinking of how tired she was of pretending to be everything she was not, and then wondering who she might be if she stopped pretending not to be what she was, when the car in front of her (fifty yards? Forty?) seemed to be plucked out of the moonlit darkness by a gigantic hand.
Gone.