Michael Gigandet | The Woman With Two Faces | Fiction
There is her “people” face, the one you see when she steps out the door of her apartment and catches the train to her office where she greets you with a handshake and smiles just long enough to be polite before she explains to you why you needn’t worry as much as you did before you came to see her. This is the face that meets deadlines and overcomes challenges, the word she uses for other peoples’ problems.
Call that face a mask if you want, but men call it beautiful and women don’t call it anything at all.
And then there’s that other face, what she thinks of as her “alone” face which she wears at night while sitting on her bathroom floor with her arms around her knees and a bottle of wine nearby, no glass, while a radio plays in another room and the people in the next apartment scream or make love. She could never tell, but she hears them even through the bathroom door. The eyes on this face don’t blink, or at least she doesn’t think so. Sometimes they dry out enough to sting.
She wonders what she looks like when she sleeps. Do her expressions race along with her dreams? Are there faces she doesn’t know about?
At night, she thinks of things she could be doing. A blouse with a stain, a skirt with a fraying hem, kitchen cabinets in need of new paper. Perhaps if she kept a list like the one she keeps at her office, one she could tape to the refrigerator door, she might be motivated to tackle a project, scratch an item off every night. Perhaps if she wore clothes while in her apartment and left the television on, she thinks
She’d just turned 9 years old, and they were alone in the apartment. Her mother had to know what would happen. She even left the bathroom door unlocked.
“I live inside a cloud sometimes, and I have to lie down until it goes away,” her mother told her once. “You must take care of things.” And the girl would fix her own meals and get herself ready for school until her mother would emerge from her bedroom and say, “How pretty you are. Such a big girl.”
She told the other children at school that her mother went to live in a cloud.
She slinks back to the floor. There was always the next day’s commitments to deal with wasn’t there? What would the people she made those promises to think?
When she was younger, she cut herself in hidden places. That couldn’t have been her people face, she thinks and presses her chin into her forearms. No, that was her alone face. What face was her mother wearing when she cut herself in the bathtub that last time?
Cutting herself like that was a silly thing to do anyway; she can see that now. Did she outgrow that?
What about college where she maintained an A average while she gave herself to lesser men because there were a lot of them and to women if they wanted her enough? One woman she met at a party cried all night until she promised her they would be best friends, and another woman whose face she couldn’t recall told her she must be “popular” in a tone of voice which didn’t sound like a compliment. Few of her lovers came back for seconds which wasn’t a compliment when she thought about it.
She learned to be careful when she left college and moved away. “’Circumspect’, that’s the word,” she thinks.
All of that, all those people are far away now, occupying themselves with whatever the hell they are doing, and she wonders why she cannot start her life afresh, just declare herself a new person, start over and make it stick. She has often willed that new life into reality, held on for a while, but everything she outran in her race, those people who knew her, her mother, they always catch up. What good is her gold medal if the applause never lasts?
There has to be something more than tomorrow’s deadlines and promises if she is going to hang on.
When she wears her alone face, she imagines herself as a passenger on a train, hurtling in and out of tunnels in the sides of mountains, never sure what’s on the other side and where she’s going. She sees herself reaching up and yanking at the chord which is supposed to stop the train in emergencies. That chord may only exist in old western movies, but it’s there in her imaginary train.
Tearing a run in her stockings some morning, waking up to see rain smash against her bedroom window, standing in front of the mirror when a button on her blouse breaks loose in her fingers – she imagines herself reaching up and grabbing that chord, bringing the train to a screeching stop, feeling it shudder, hearing the cars’ couplings snap and pop while she slides on the floor with the baggage, thinking only of the joy she will feel when the train stops. That won’t be her people face, and it won’t be her alone face either. That face will be new.
Michael Gigandet is a retired lawyer in Tennessee. His stories have appeared in Bending Genres, Quarencia Press, Great Weather for Media, Palm Sized Press, Syncopation Literary Journal and The Hong Kong Literary Journal. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize this year. His published stories are available herehttp://michaelgigandet.com. He administers a music page on Twitter/X at @motobec810.