11/5/10

Mallory Square Reunion
By Sally York


Instead of buying a book, he set a bamboo bong on the counter and said to me, all shy and sweet, “I made this for you.” His opening line. I closed the shop at six and ran down Duvall to meet him at Mallory Square, arriving just in time to catch the cheers of tourists and hippies and transvestites as the orange ball splashed into the purple ocean.

As if the sun deserved praise for setting! As if it isn't harder to stay up in the sky than to fall.

It's been thirty-five years since Jeff and I said goodbye along a sand-kissed stretch of U.S. 1. I'm on a bench under the middle arch in Mallory Square, and I can almost taste the banana pancakes he cooked for us on that long-ago morning, their wild perfection.

The square is alive with costumed dancers and fire-eaters and craftsmen, and for one crazy moment I expect to see Jeff among them, cross-legged on a blanket, selling his bongs. Under the next arch, a woman with frizzy hair is studying a sailor's palm. I'm tempted to get a reading.

Will he recognize me? Will we find anything to say to each other? Are his eyes still the color of key lime pie?

I stay where I am. Jeff—a widowed English teacher at a college in upstate New York—and I agreed to meet here at sunset, reconnecting last month through the great and powerful Google god. I don't want to risk missing him.

So I take in the swelling crowd of tourists, much larger than in the old days. Wealthier, too, judging by their tailored white slacks, their gold bracelets, their soft leather sandals. The street people haven't changed: An old gator in a captain's cap just hit me up for spare change. “Sorry,” I said, smiling tightly, “I'm not carrying cash.” A stringy-haired girl on a bicycle, no older than eight, offers me a folded map of Key West for five dollars, the kind you can get for free in any local shop.

I politely say no. I must have walked every block, every brick alley and tucked-away neighborhood, on this tiny island during the year I lived here, right after high school. A couple sits down beside me on the bench. The man hands the woman a conch fritter in a paper pouch, tells her, “Try it, you'll like it.”

All at once it's 1975 and I'm with Jeff at an obscure cove on Little Torch Key, swimming with some of his friends. The girls aren't wearing tops, and he encourages me to take off mine, but I'm self-conscious. “Go ahead, it's okay,” he says gently, his crooked Irish grin disarming me.

I'm pulled back to the present when a passing tourist lifts his collar off his sweaty neck, a move that reminds me of my ex-husband. The thought of him reminds me that I'm not a young woman who could be coaxed into swimming topless anymore; I haven't been her for a long time. I resist an urge to dig my compact mirror out of my purse and check my makeup.

The crowd is cresting. People are jammed in a circle around housecats trained to walk a tightrope, around a woman juggling rolling pins on a unicycle. Above the spectators and the huskers, above us all, is the sun, the main attraction at Mallory Square. It's descending slowly, teasingly, as if it might change its mind about setting tonight. I glance at my watch and feel a stab of rejection.

Jeff's not coming, I'm suddenly sure of it. I remember how we ended, with him leaving for a job in San Francisco, and me hitchhiking back to Michigan to try college.

“I'll miss you,” I said as we stood next to the highway, our arms around each other, a duffel bag at my feet.

“Me too,” he said. “But I think we both know it's time.”

The ersatz captain walks up again, and I'm about to tell him to get lost when he says he cadged some change from somebody else and used it to buy a rose. Bowing lavishly, he presents it to me.

I look at him and see it now, there in the glitter of his lime-green eyes.

Just then the sun goes down, and everyone applauds.


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Sally York is working on a collection of short fiction and lives in Michigan. Her work has appeared in Every Day Fiction, MicroHorror and Weirdyear (upcoming).