She smelled of patchouli and day old gravy as she leaned over me to hug her skinny, grimy boyfriend across the aisle. I hugged the window instead and tried not to wrinkle my nose as I watched them in the slight reflection. Meaty arms, my dad would have said. Could roast that pig-fat for Christmas morning. Her arms enveloped him like a shawl flopped off a lap and on to the floor.
“So I heard that we need to get renter’s insurance,” Patchouli was saying to her boyfriend, Mr. Grimes. “It’s just like home insurance, but, you know, for renters.”
Mr. Grimes clutched his Styrofoam plate of strawberry-something-that-once-might-have-been cake and held a forkful out to Patchouli. She giggled (like them pigs do right before slaughter, my dad would have said) and opened up her mouth wide probably thinking she looked like a child. Mr. Grimes jabbed the plastic fork near her and she closed her mouth too fast sending crumbs rolling down the front of her shirt. That cake is grateful, I thought as Patchouli brushed them off her lap and on to mine. She gave me a quick glance and went back to slopping her arms back over Mr. Grimes, aware I was sitting next to him in our facing benches on the afternoon train. Mr. Grimes went back to hugging his Styrofoam plate.
I tried to concentrate on the scenery going by the window but my eyes kept coming back to Patchouli. She had a full skirt on over high-topped hiking boots, a dog collar around her neck and the tattoo of a five-pointed star beneath her ear. At once, I saw her miserable future with Mr. Grimes. She’d be pregnant shortly after they moved in together. An accident, she would say, but that wouldn’t be true. There were runny-nosed, carroty-haired, pasty-faced freckly kids that would follow, each with their own Sippy cups or undone laces. She would take up smoking after Mr. Grimes left her for a blonde thrash metal bass player of ambiguous gender. She might decide to babysit other people’s children whereupon the parent’s of those other children would chastise her for the foul language she used. The babysitting thing wouldn’t work out long. She’d grow old, her children would be very successful or not at all, hating her all the while. She’d have bingo, varicose veins and a smoker’s cough to keep her company on Friday nights, and a Chihuahua named Prince for the rest.
She planted another slobbery kiss on Mr. Grimes and looked at me from the corner of her eye.
Girlfriend, I thought, enjoy it while you can.
