By the Jailhouse

As I was walking down a boulevard, enjoying the spring air and admiring the small trees that had been planted every few feet along the sidewalk, I came across the stone building that served as the county jail. I happened to glance over as I was passing the front steps of the building, and I noticed a woman with curly, bleached blonde hair across the street, crouched down and hiding behind a hedge. Her eyes were just over the top of the hedge, and she was staring intently at the front doors of the jailhouse. This struck me as strange, almost comical, and I was curious about why the woman was there. So, when I got to the corner, I spent a few moments contemplating the bronze statue of the town’s founder that looked out over the five point intersection, and then I turned around and went back the way that I had come, so that I could cross by the spot where I’d seen the woman once more.

As I passed by the jailhouse again, there was a young man wearing sunglasses and a grey jacket, hustling down the steps. His shoulder bumped into mine, almost knocking me to the ground, but he didn’t stop to acknowledge me there. He didn’t even seem to notice that he had ran into me. He just stopped at the curb, glanced quickly up the street, and then hurried across to the blonde woman hiding behind the hedge. She came out to meet him with her arms wide to embrace him, her black heels clicking against the pavement as she shuffled her feet, and a shopping bag dangling from her left hand. I shook my head, thinking that it had been silly for her to hide like that, as though this had been a carefully orchestrated jailbreak rather than a legitimately scheduled release, as though all dealings of any kind with the county jail required skulking about and hiding behind bushes.

The young man was clearly the blonde woman’s boyfriend, and even he asked her what she was doing over there in the bushes. But he didn’t really bother waiting for an answer; he just shook his head. He snatched the shopping bag from her hand and peered down into it. “What the hell is this?” he asked her, his raised voice carrying across the street. He drew a blue sequinned dress up out of the bag, holding the price tag for her to see. She fidgited in place and fumbled in her pockets for a cigarette, and they both immediately launched into what seemed like an old, old argument about money.

I started to move on, feeling too conspicuous standing there and watching this couple argue. I could hear the blonde woman behind me in tears, her high-pitched voice carrying over her boyfriend’s low grumbles. She told him about all the places that she wanted them to go, fancy restaurants and nice stores, maybe even plays and art galleries. Somehow the sequinned dress was some necessary component of these fantasies, the key to the whole thing. She wanted them to have a new life, glossy and brightly colored, smooth and elegant. “And now you’ve ruined it, ruined everything!” she told him, stamping her heel on the sidewalk. Things were supposed to go a certain way when he got out of jail, when he came out and saw the dress, and already, from the very first scene, he had deviated from that long reel of celluloid images that she had hoped to see unwinding far into their future.

I heard the paper crinkle of the dress going back into the bag, and I glanced back to see the boyfriend put his hand on her arm to calm her, to comfort her, to tell her that he was sorry. But she had her head down, stubbornly refusing to be consoled. Their new life would be just like their old life, that picture perfect moment in the candlelight with the waiter holding the bottle of wine would always be just beyond their reach, always belonging to someone else, somewhere else. But they started away together down the boulevard, her sullenness subsiding as she rested her head on his shoulder. I just shrugged and turned the corner onto another sunny street.