It’s late and the bus is still an hour away from this small town in the northern neck of upstate New York. I’m outside on a bench—inside there are pinball machines no one is playing. We start slowly. I ask if she’s sure the bus will really come. “It will,” she says. She sees I’m on my laptop and tells me the Wi-Fi password to the coffee shop next door. She takes out some cigarettes. On some days she has to choose, she says, cigarettes or food.
Voices come through on her walkie-talkie. Taxi drivers. She tells me how bad everything is in the town. How her taxi drivers used to be engineers. They used to be CEOs. How everyone is in decline, “including me.” But she also laughs. She is sad, but she is more happy than sad, I would say.
One of the voices belongs to a man named Steve. He is one of the drivers. Or he is her husband, I can’t tell.
“Bye, my love,” she says to Steve.
I keep becoming invested in these little stranger interactions. I can’t tell if I’m just searching for something to spice the vacant hours, or if it’s because of something larger, my real life turning into a wasteland where unknowability and drama and color are flowers that no longer bloom.
“Thanks, sweetheart,” she says to Steve.
“Taxi driving is where they can hide,” she says to me, not without sympathy. Now that they’re no longer engineers, no longer CEOs.
She used to be someone else too, she tells me in between drags. Used to study anthropology. Now, she is hiding. On her days off, she says, she doesn’t come here, where we are.
“Otherwise I’m just bus lady. Taxi lady.”
On her days off, she doesn’t want to be these things. Her walkie-talkie keeps ringing, almost every minute. When we’re talking, she lets it ring longer before she presses the button to receive the call. In the parking lot, our conversation accelerates into increasingly personal territory. I tell her I think I am in decline too — she said it so I can say it. We are talking about things maybe we wouldn’t talk about if we knew each other better.
“What is your name, by the way?” she asks.
The bus will be here soon, but before it comes, Steve shows up. He comes from around a corner so I can’t see if he is coming from a taxi or he’s just there to keep her company during the graveyard shift, to share a cigarette. I like the idea of that, of Steve speeding over for a few drags with his wife, this lonely corner a little less lonely. We all talk for a while and then Steve leaves. He heads back around the corner, and when the dispatcher starts talking about him, she still never pivots to a “we.” Then she mentions an ex-girlfriend, though maybe she dates men too.
I end up appreciating the ambiguity — that all I can puzzle out of them is their fondness for each other. Then the dispatcher’s walkie-talkie starts ringing again and I throw my backpack over my shoulder. As the bus pulls up, we wish each other nice lives.
Jason Schwartzman is the senior editor of True.Ink, the revival of an old pulp & adventure magazine. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Narratively, Hobart, River Teeth, and Human Parts, among other places. You can find him on twitter at @jdschwartzman. His website is jdschwartzman.com.