Touch and Go by Gwyneth Hughes

The waitress didn’t look familiar, just another drab middle-aged blonde. It was only after she’d carried away his empty steak plate and brought him a wedge of pumpkin pie that she timidly asked if his name wasn’t Harvey Snyder.

            “Yes, it is,” he replied with annoyance. The woman was about his age and must have been a classmate long ago.

            “You don’t remember me?”

            “Afraid not. Sorry. I’m in a bit of a rush. Maybe next time.” Harvey put a forkful of pie in his mouth.

            The waitress wrote out his check, mumbled the customary “Thank you, sir”, and went to another table with the menu.

            Harvey finished his pie, drank his coffee, left his tip, paid his bill at the counter, and walked out into the parking lot. He got into his car and drove past the wide windows of the restaurant where he saw the waitress pause in her activities to gaze in his direction.

            Suddenly recognition flashed through his mind. He swung into a vacant place and turned off the motor. His heart pounded in his ears, his palms and forehead sweated, his chest collapsed. Helen! Helen Jackson! It took him ten minutes to get control of his emotions and walk back into the restaurant.

            “Can I help you, sir?” enquired the cashier at the entrance.

            “Yes. I’d like to say a word to the waitress, if I may.”

            The cashier’s expression indicated that only a few impersonal words would be tolerated. She motioned to Helen, who went to an empty table at a distance from the other diners and wiped its already clean surface while Harvey approached.

            “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I was a million miles away.”

            “That’s all right. No offence.”

            “Could we meet later on?”

            “I get off at three.”

            “Three isn’t possible.”

            Helen glanced past him toward the cashier. “Give me a better time then.”

            “I could make it by five.”

            “Okay, five. Five is fine. Wait for me in the parking lot.”

            She spun around and walked away. Harvey heard her asking clients if they were ready to order as he nodded to the dour cashier and went out.

            The sale of his mother’s house took longer than anticipated. It was past six, and dusk, when he drove back into the restaurant parking lot, sure there was no hope of seeing Helen again without questioning the uncooperative cashier. But as soon as he parked, Helen came forward, as if she had been standing in the lot for an hour, waiting. She got in and pulled the door shut.

            “Where would you like to go?” he asked.

            “There’s a bar on Webster. It’s quiet and respectable.”

            “Fine.” Harvey drove to the pavement. “Left or right?”

            “You don’t remember Webster Street?”

            “It’s been thirty years, Helen,” he answered belligerently. “I’ve been to a lot of places in thirty years.”

            “Turn right. So this is the first time you’ve come back since we graduated?”

            “The first and I hope the last. I only came this time because I had to. My mother died. It was too complicated to deal with the formalities by proxy. Excuse me for being late.”

            “That’s okay. I didn’t have anything else planned.”

            Helen seemed to know several people in the bar and ordered a hard drink. Harvey asked for a coke, with no ice.

            “Aren’t you afraid it will keep you awake?” she teased.

            “Nothing keeps me awake,” Harvey answered with his most world-weary intonation. He had no intention of letting Helen intimidate him with her smart remarks. Not now, not after twenty-five years of a successful career, during which time she had apparently done nothing but descend step by step from her pinnacle of adolescent glory to the humble status of steak-house waitress.

            She took a pack of cigarettes from her purse, set it on the tabletop for him to share, took one, and waited for him to act out his male role and pull a lighter from his pocket.

            “Sorry, I don’t smoke.”

            She tilted her head flippantly. “You don’t drink, you don’t smoke…” She lit her cigarette with her own dime-store lighter and blew the smoke away from him. “How long will you be in town?”

            “Only until tomorrow morning.”

            “Early?”

            “I should leave by six. I’d like to get to Connecticut for supper.”

            “Someone waiting?”

            “Sure. I’ve got a wife and kids. Haven’t you?”

            “A husband, but no children,” she said stiffly.

            “Anyone I know?” He rattled the ice he hadn’t wanted against the edge of the glass in annoyance. Had he been alone, he would have removed the cubes with his fingers and set them in the ashtray.

            “Bill Butler.” She sipped her drink.

            For a moment Harvey’s mind remained blank, focused on the infuriating lumps of ice.

            “He was a year ahead of us in school,” she added.

            Harvey turned to stare at Helen. This dowdy, bitter woman was Bill Butler’s wife? “Sure, I remember him! Who could forget Bill Butler?”

            Handsome, athletic, a good student, friendly with everyone, the lead in the junior play and, in his last year, student-body president. Everything Harvey was not, then, and had known he never could be.

            Helen gave a huff, as if her greatest desire was to forget about the man. “You’re the celebrity now,” she said, excluding Bill Butler from the conversation.

            Harvey motioned toward the barman. “I’d like a spoon, please, and a saucer.” When they were brought to him, he scooped the remaining ice from his glass. “Stupid American custom. Nowhere else on earth is frozen water considered a delicacy.”

            Helen watched the operation, intrigued. “Your profession has taken you around the world?”

            “Several times. Europe, Asia…”

            “Were you already interested in photography in high school?”

            “I wasn’t interested in anything in high school except getting out of the place. Those were the worst three years of my life.”

            Helen’s eyes widened further. Obviously she remembered their high school days as idyllic. And the popular Bill Butler surely never contradicted her.

            “I was too tall, too thin, too awkward. I had acne so bad no girl would go out with me. They called me ‘Scarecrow’. Remember?”

            Helen nodded.

            “The only pocket money I had came from a paper route. When half of the guys in our class were driving to school in their own cars, I still came on my bike. I wasn’t any good in sports. Thought gym was a waste of time. Still do, in fact. In all my spare time I went to the movies. Which didn’t make me much of a student.”

            “Did you go to college?”

            “No. The day after graduation I headed straight for Hollywood.”

            “Hollywood?” she giggled.

            “To become a film maker. I got a menial job in a studio and ended up on a camera crew. At first just manipulating the trolley. Then…” he shrugged. “You know how it goes.” He realized she probably didn’t have the foggiest idea of the way a young employee works up the ladder of responsibility in an enterprise, so he didn’t wait for her reply. “Becoming a professional photographer was a streak of luck. I was part of a team sent to film a few scenes in a foreign country. On a free afternoon, I went sightseeing and found myself in the middle of an insurgency with a camera in my hand. My shots were on all the front pages.”

            “Where they’ve remained for twenty-five years.”

            “Not the same shots,” chuckled Harvey.

            “It’s too bad you’re leaving so soon. There are a lot of people in town who’d be overjoyed to see you again.”

            “I’m glad I ran into you.” Harvey felt his throat tighten. “You were one of the nicest girls around. I never once heard you snicker behind my back. Or call me Scarecrow.”

            “If those imbeciles had known what they were going to turn into, thirty years later!”

            “How come Bill…?” Harvey cleared his throat, afraid she’d take offence.

            Instead, Helen said, “Buy me another drink and I’ll tell you about it.”

            He did. Another for her. No more for him. The barman brought Helen a glass and carried off Harvey’s saucer of melted ice. Then Helen told him the story of her unfortunate marriage.

            Bill, being a year older, had finished college when she was still in her third year. His father wanted to retire and leave his flourishing real-estate practice in Bill’s hands. It sounded perfect, and Helen’s mother persuaded her not to miss such an exceptional proposal. Their marriage was the event of the season. She enrolled in her senior year, but Bill’s career demanded her presence at an unending series of social events, and so, inevitably, she failed to get her degree. Not that she would have used it, not at that time anyway. She and Bill attended every festivity in the region and promoted as many more. Then Bill’s father died, and what many had suspected for years became common knowledge: without his father’s guidance, Bill was incapable of running a business. Helen and a few close friends tried to convince him to get a partner, an able assistant. But when you’ve been the smartest, most handsome, most popular boy in school, you can’t admit to being incapable of doing what your father did before you. As his business disintegrated, Bill bolstered his morale with alcohol. He grew surly, brutal. He frightened her. Helen finally looked for a job herself. Without even knowing how to type!

            “I kept expecting him to pull out of it,” she concluded and added, “If I’d known then…”

            “If you’d known then…” Harvey prompted.

            “I would have left him. I would have had the courage to move on alone ten years ago. But now? What can I do now?”

            She shook her head dolefully and lifted her glass to lick down the last drop.

            “Come with me tomorrow to New Haven.”

            Helen remained motionless, not even shifting her eyes toward him.

            “We have a big house. There’s a guest room in the garden. You could stay with us until you found a job.”

            “How long would that be?” Helen still didn’t look his way.

            “As a waitress?”

            Helen spoke loudly, as if she and Harvey were arguing. “Must it be as a waitress?”

            “Maybe as a receptionist,” Harvey mumbled apologetically. “My wife is a doctor. She knows a lot of people. So do I. Between us, if you’re willing to consider another field…”

            “Any other field!” Helen enunciated in her loud voice. “Nothing could be worse than what I do now.”

            They talked on and on, Harvey enthusiastic, Helen more optimistic, until hours later they realized they had had no dinner. They left the bar and ate a snack in an all-night coffee shop, like giddy teenagers after a late movie. Harvey drove Helen to the corner of her street, waited as she walked under the streetlamps to a gate and disappeared up her front steps. She had assured him that Bill would be too drunk at this hour of the night to question her late arrival. And the next day she’d be gone before he roused himself from his usual morning torpor.

            It was two in the morning before Harvey fell asleep. His alarm woke him at five. He had trouble finding his route back to the restaurant and ended up on the opposite side of the thoroughfare. To turn around he’d need to go to the next intersection. Instead, he backed into a space at the corner of a one-way street, perpendicular to the empty parking lot across the avenue. Helen would see him there, he yawned. Then it occurred to him that she probably had only a vague idea of the brand or color of his car. She had been inside the vehicle only briefly and in artificial lighting. He rose to stand on the pavement, turning up the collar of his jacket to the cold air, hoping she’d hurry.

            Or not come at all. This last thought was expelled from his mind with a shudder. He was the one who had convinced her, only a few hours earlier, that his offer to drive her back east and lodge her temporarily was the chance of a lifetime. That she’d be a coward, a fool, a martyr to miss it. It had all seemed so clear to him the night before. Bill would resign himself like a gentleman to his wife’s departure. Helen would find a job straight off. She and his wife would become friends. Harvey would have done a good deed for an old acquaintance in dire need of help. He’d be proud of that. Nothing more. The fact he had been passionately in love with Helen in his adolescence had seemed irrelevant. The fact that his doctor wife was gone all day, while he spent hours in his basement laboratory, the children away at school, hadn’t crossed his mind. It did now. The entire picture appeared as if viewed on a negative. Bill had merely to question the cashier in the restaurant or the barman in the saloon to come gunning for Helen. This alcoholic brute might endanger members of Harvey’s own family. With what justification? Could he be sure of Helen’s integrity? Did she have the moral fiber to radically change her lifestyle, with or without his help? After all, he barely knew the woman. Up until last night’s conversation, they had exchanged no more than the stereotyped remarks of youngsters on casual terms. Yet here he was, taking himself for Prince Charming about to rescue the Damsel in Distress.

            Helen rose at that moment from the front steps of the restaurant where she had been sitting. She had arrived earlier than Harvey, expecting him to drive into the parking area and spot her there. Now she was beginning to find the wait long. She carried her suitcase to the middle of the lot.

            Harvey moved around the car to the trunk and took out one of the cameras he kept there, each loaded with a different type of film. He chose the one most suitable for this bleak morning light. From behind his car he took a series of shots of a forlorn woman standing in an empty parking lot with a suitcase at her feet. At one point she consulted her watch. As Harvey clicked the shutter on what he foresaw would be the best picture of the batch, he wondered if she was thinking of him with rising doubts or of her boorish husband Bill, perhaps waking now to find her note of farewell.

            Harvey put the camera on the back seat and climbed in behind the steering wheel. He turned on the ignition, glided out into the thoroughfare, and accelerated. He didn’t stop again until he ran out of gas many hours later, the old hometown he had hated for thirty years hundreds of miles out of sight behind him.