Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [138]
Kit shook her head as if equally exasperated by their mutual ignorance.
“Well, I don’t know either,” Caroline-person said. “So, who’d you see off?”
“What?”
“To Seattle.”
“Oh,” Kit said.
“Something the matter?”
“It was Billy,” Kit said. “It was Billy I put on the plane.”
“Kit,” she said, “I haven’t seen you in years. Who’s this Billy?” She gave her a sly girlish smile. “Must be somebody special.”
Kit nodded. “Yeah. Must be.”
“Oh,” Caroline said, “you can tell me.”
“Actually, I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, I’d just rather not.”
A smile took over Caroline’s face like the moon taking over the sun during an eclipse. “But you can. You can tell me.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t remember you, Caroline. I don’t remember the first thing about you. I know a person’s not supposed to admit that, but it’s been a bad couple of days, and I just don’t know who you are. Probably we went to college together or something, classics majors and all that, but I can’t remember.” People rushed past them and around them. “I don’t remember you at all.”
“You’re kidding,” the woman said.
“No,” Kit said, “I’m not. I can’t remember seeing you before.”
The woman who said her name was Caroline put her hand on her forehead and stared at Kit with a what-have-we-here? shocked look. Kit knew she was supposed to feel humiliated and embarrassed, but instead she felt shiny and new and fine for the first time all day. She didn’t like to be tactless, but that seemed to be the direction, at least right now, this weekend, where her freedom lay. She’d been so good for so long, she thought, so loving and sweet and agreeable, and look where it had gotten her. “You’re telling me,” the woman said, “that you don’t remember our—”
“Stop,” Kit said. “Don’t tell me.”
“Wait. You don’t even want to be reminded? You’re … But why? Now I’m offended,” the woman told her. “Let’s start over. Let’s begin again. Kit, I feel very hurt.”
“I know,” Kit said. “It’s been a really strange afternoon.”
“I just don’t think …,” the woman said, but then she was unable to finish the sentence. “Our ride into the city …”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Kit said. “I couldn’t take up your offer. I’ll ride the bus back. They have good buses here,” she added.
“No,” she said. “Go with me.”
“I can’t, Caroline. I don’t remember you. We’re strangers.”
“Well, uh, good-bye then,” the woman muttered. “You certainly have changed.”
“I certainly have. But I’m almost never like this. It’s Billy who did this to me.” She gazed in Caroline’s direction. “And my vocabulary,” she said, not quite knowing what she meant. But she liked it, so she repeated it. “My vocabulary did this to me.”
“It’s that bad?” the woman said.
Standing in O’Hare Airport, where she had gone for no good reason except that she could not stand to be alone in her apartment, she felt, for about ten seconds, tiny and scaled-down, like a model person in a model airport as viewed from above, and she reached out and balanced herself on the driver’s-side door handle and then shook her head and closed her eyes. If she accepted compassion from this woman, there would be nothing left of her in the morning. Sympathy would give her chills and fever, and she would start shaking, and the shaking would move her out of the hurricane’s eye into the hurricane itself, and it would batter her, and then wear her away to the zero. Nothing in life had ever hurt her more than sympathy.
“I have to go now,” Kit said, turning away. She walked fast, and then ran,