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Groundhog Day - Part Five

By Arthur Phillips

There's nothing sadder than an afternoon spent at work Googling lost loves, except perhaps a night spent composing retorts to sports-talk personalities. But a new day brings another lunch hour, and another opportunity to, maybe, see the girl in the window.

A slender, circling shadow pivots across his sports magazine and sandwich, a window washer's blade swooping and rotating, lapping up streaks of winter grit from O.B. LEARY'S front. And when the aproned, stocking-capped cleaner moves to the other window on the far side of the door, she has appeared. She wears a plain white T-shirt and unbuttons a tiny dummy's pants from behind. Seven sandwiches have been eaten since her last sighting, and she is now an almost overwhelming beauty. He wants to speak to her, to see her face from a reasonable distance, to hear her voice and be surprised by its unpredictable tone. He wants her to surprise him. He could do it today.

The noon sun is transforming icicles into faulty water faucets, and her snowy awning into a prankster's perch for sliding, thumping attacks on unwary pedestrians. What can he possibly say to a woman at least 10 years younger than him? Fifteen. He has only seen her in a display case. He knows this. He has no experience with this, no scripts or technique, no recollections to fall back on, and this is good. He does not know what he will say when she eventually descends to street level and walks out that door just across from him. He will emerge from behind his copper bar and newly sparkling window, and he will say something which will occur to him only just then, triggered by no woman but her.

He watches her undress and redress her wards, strip their winter boots and distribute sundresses, baseball caps, T-shirts emblazoned with hearts and puppies. She issues badminton racquets and frisbees, stiff leashes attached to invisible doggies, a bunch of plastic wildflowers. She seems to be speaking to the mannequins, some mock familiarity with old workmates (or she is talking to someone out of view behind the concave white wall). She has a gesture that he recognizes today from a previous sandwich, something he has never seen elsewhere. This unique gesture is hers, and now a little bit his, should they become friends. She has surprised him already, in something as small as this. Just a drumming of her hands on the sides of her thighs as she considers the placement of a frisbee, but it is new. Surprises are still possible. More than one thing can be inevitable.

He does not want to force things. He will not sit here for six hours creepily awaiting the end of her shift. He will not come back tonight to find her. If it is inevitable, then a solution will be obvious. She leaves her window. He feels happy. One of the children's bunched-sleeve sweatshirts bears a crimson H.

He turns over his shoulder and signals for his check. When he turns back, he has to blink against the sun, newly emerged from a cloud and electrifying her awning's blinding white tubes of snow that break and fall and powder the sidewalk with the muffled sound of artillery three towns away. And, after one of these frosty chutes, in the subsequent cloud of golden white dust, standing across the street is -- her?

Not her? He has never seen her down on his plane before, he needs an instant. It is her. She stands coatless outside her store's entrance, on the corner. She drums the sides of her thighs (like she does). And his check arrives. This seems sufficiently inevitable. He will do it. He drops too much money on the scribbled check, grabs his coat, opens the door, but then must step back inside for the inevitable crowd of German tourists who hesitate then decide to enter then hesitate again halfway through the door he holds for them. Passing traffic swells into the brown cube of a UPS truck and she vanishes behind it as he bites his lips at the vacillating tourists. "If I could just...please," and they shuffle and struggle to let him pass. The truck passes. She is still there. He turns his head to check the traffic: a yellow VW bug creeps by with the murderous deliberation of a parking spot hunter. Across the street, she is still there. And he watches her kiss a boy in an open tweed overcoat. The boy holds her upturned face in his palms and kisses her mouth, and one of the glass awning's last half-tubes of snow swishes from under her mannequins and dusts her lover's back and slaps at his feet and she wraps her arms around his waist inside his coat, and she presses her cheek against his chest. The two of them turn and walk down the little street perpendicular to Whit's once-favorite boulevard.

There is a certain inevitability in this ending, too, one that is not only painful. The boy was her age, after all, though oddly conservative and retro-collegiate to her hipster look. They were nice together. They may not last, not many do. Her eyes squeezed shut and her temple pressed to his chest after a real kiss -- Claire did that from time to time, her warmest moments in a way, a gesture of vibrating, urgent, more-than-I-can-say intimacy laced with dumb jokes ("I've been miserable and Whitless all day"). Her hands inside his tweed coat, meeting at the small of his back. Whit is happy for her, his friend with the cloth children.

He also breathes shallowly, his lips twisted to one side. He chews the inside of the lower one. This girl's not so entirely unique after all: this is how tears used to begin for Claire's sufferings, and how he used to stifle them. But if that sorrow was a pressing, grinding weight, stone after stone laid on his chest, this is a series of sharp kicks from the side, shoves from gremlins, bruising the ribs and jarring the breath.

Perhaps it is different after all. He doesn't want this to happen ever again, but it is new.

"THINK SPRING!!" advises the banner across the street and over his head. He turns back and sees through the sparkling clean window his 150% tip being acknowledged with raised eyebrows and a jutted-out lower lip. Of all the things it occurs to him to do--go inside and snatch his tip from the happy waiter, pursue and punish the boy in the tweed coat, fall to his knees and howl in the slush and sand, curse God again, vow again never to -- he crosses the street and joins the semi-circle forming around the fat conjuror. The plump wizard has learned: he performs in front of windows behind which no humans can spy on him, as they are instead occupied by the stiff, silver parents of the stuffed kids upstairs. The magician is not at all bad from this angle. His facial expression is odd -- a fixed vaguely bovine smile, mechanically constructed as if from schematics, and at each pay-off (the coin is gone, the rope is intact, the raspberry is a lime), his short black eyebrows sleepily rise and drop the same small distance.

Despite what he knows, Whit is duly amazed by the sleight-of-hand. He recalls his illicit angle on the magic some weeks ago, but today he can't figure out how the awkward man is doing it. From this better view, a half-cigarette just effortlessly escapes from a closed fist and emerges feet away underneath an overturned coffee cup. That is the better way to see it and Whit applauds with everyone else, even a little longer. Each trick is an increasingly flabbergasting marvel, and he cheers louder than the loudest of the little boys. At the end, he drops an extravagant amount of cash into the magician's passed hat.