RUSH HOUR
ROBERT LOERZEL

Sometimes Mary had difficulty shutting the dresser drawers, and she would attempt to sort out her panties, socks and bras so they would fit in more efficiently. To her husband, John, it looked as if Mary were pulling out an endless quantity of undergarments, like a magician drawing out a string of handkerchiefs from his pocket. The dresser drawers looked so small, yet they contained so much. John had always doubted Mary would be able to fit all of the clothes back into the dresser, but she’d proved him wrong every time until now.

But then, at last, his fears had come true and Mary’s clothes overwhelmed the dresser drawers and closet space set aside for them. And so, to make space for Mary’s wardrobe, John’s clothes became refugees from their own room. John began hanging his shirts and pants in the closet of the empty room where their son Scott had slept until a few years before. John’s 31 pairs of shoes, most of them black wingtips or brown loafers, were scattered across the floor. Once, Mary asked him why he didn’t put the shoes inside Scott’s closet. "Why do you have to lay them all over the floor?" she said. "What do you need so many shoes for, anyway? Most of them you never wear." But no one except John ever went into that room, so he didn’t see what difference it made.

When John went inside the room to slip on a pair of shoes or change shirts, he glanced at the posters of rock stars his son had left hanging on the walls when he moved out. Scott didn’t like these particular performers much anymore, but his father didn’t know one rock band from the next. He had become so accustomed to the posters that they seemed like a natural part of the wallpaper.

Sometimes, John pulled one of his shirts from the closet in Scott’s room and put it on, then he stood there for an unusually long time, looking at the shoes while the eyes of the rock stars stared down at him. John touched the side of his rib cage with his finger, in the place the doctor had pointed to on the X-ray. John could feel something pulsing deep below his skin, as if he had grown a second heart.

Each day on the way to work, John considered driving past his exit ramp, past the office. And when he went home at night, he felt the same urge, to drive somewhere else, someplace far away from home, to keep on driving without telling anyone from work, without telling Mary. It seemed like it would be such a simple thing to do.

When John came out of his office in the evening, the sky was already rushing toward darkness. He shivered, pulling his coat tighter around him. When he started the engine of the car, the radio came on much too loud. He turned on the headlights, realizing it had been dark when he came to work and now it was dark again. John wondered if the day had had any light at all.

Although it was rush hour, the traffic was peculiarly light. John listened to the traffic reports on his car radio to see if there was an explanation. The announcer rattled off a list of times and expressway names too quickly for him to comprehend. John looked at the drivers of the other cars as if they would offer him clues, but they were intent upon their driving, apparently unaware of anything unusual. The El trains that passed along the highways were nearly empty. Only a few lonely people waited for the trains at each stop.

When he arrived home, Mary had already cooked chicken and potatoes with salad and rolls, his favorite meal. As John started to eat, he told her it was good, just as he had said every time. But he saw that Mary had cooked six or seven pieces of chicken and four potatoes, the same as she had always made when Larry and Scott still lived at home. John frowned. They’d have to put some of this food away for leftovers.

"Did you know the Elsfords moved?" Mary said.

"No." John stopped chewing for a moment. "They’ve left already? Where did they go?"

"I’m not sure. I just noticed their house was empty today. I asked Margaret about it, and she said they didn’t tell her they were leaving, either. Just up and left. Didn’t say good-bye to anyone. And after all those times we invited them over here. I just don’t understand it. You know, they didn’t even put up a ‘For Sale’ sign in front of their house."

"Maybe they’re not selling it."

"Then why’d they leave?"

John didn’t have an answer. He put a piece of potato into his mouth.

When Scott still lived at home, he had left his bedroom door open almost constantly. John used to get up in the middle of the night and walk to the refrigerator. He would hear Scott, his older son, snoring through the open door.

Their younger son, Larry, though, had kept the door to his room closed day and night, so he could read his books or do whatever it was he did inside there. Whenever John had entered his younger son’s room, Larry had been doing something innocent. Most times, the door had opened to reveal the boy doing his homework or drawing a picture. But John had never gotten used to the sight of that door being shut. It always seemed as if something secret were happening in that room.

Now that Larry had moved out, too, John and Mary still kept the door shut. John wanted to leave it open, but Mary said it bothered her to see the mess every time she passed the doorway. While Scott’s room filled with shoes, Larry’s room had gradually piled up with boxes and papers and unwanted gifts and broken pieces of furniture and other things John and Mary could find no proper place for.

In the early evenings, when John sat in his easy chair in front of the television, he looked down the hallway toward the bedroom doors, one closed and one open. It was easy enough to imagine Larry and Scott in their rooms, Scott sprawled out on the floor watching the extra television, Larry at his desk writing things in his notebook John and Mary would never comprehend, diagrams of strange geometric shapes and words they had never heard before.

"It’s nice to have more space now," John said suddenly, startling even himself with the hollow sound of his voice. Mary raised an eyebrow and turned away from the TV to look at her husband for a moment, but she didn’t say anything.

When Mary faced the TV again, John watched her from the corner of his eye. He thought he might see something that would remind him of how much they loved each other. He remembered how much they used to talk when they first met, even for the first fifteen or twenty years after they got married.

John noticed the lines in Mary’s face that ran from the edges of her nose down along the sides of her mouth. He had seen them before, of course, but the contours of Mary’s face were somehow different now. He tried to look at the rest of her, but his gaze kept returning to those lines.

John dreamed one night that he was awakened by the rumbling noise of a truck engine. He found himself on the floor, the bed missing. He looked around the bedroom, then he ran through the other rooms of the house. Everything had been taken, the furniture, the TV, the shoes on the floor of Scott’s room, the junk in Larry’s room, the pile of magazines next to the easy chair, the refrigerator and all of the leftovers inside it. John walked outside in his pajamas and saw a moving van pulling away. He chased after it, but he couldn’t catch the truck as it sped away on the winding street. He wondered if his wife was inside the van.
 

The weather remained cold, but the days grew a few minutes longer each week. After working eight hours, driving home, eating dinner and watching Mary search for a place in the refrigerator where she could fit the leftovers, John would look in the TV Guide. On most nights, nothing on the schedule caught his interest and he told Mary, "I think I’ll take a walk. I’ll be back in a little bit." Mary, leaning into the refrigerator with the warm Tupperware in her hand, would mumble something John couldn’t make out.

John walked at a slow, methodical pace. If he didn’t watch himself, he would begin to walk faster, and when this happened, he sometimes felt the throbbing of the thing by his rib cage. He would stop walking momentarily and lightly press his hand against the place under his armpit to see if it was still pulsing.

John tried to follow a different walking route each evening, but he never strayed far from the curving streets of their subdivision. The houses looked the same for the most part. Without realizing what he was doing, John looked for the subtle differences among the houses, the variations in color, the trimming of the hedges, the way a few scattered leaves lay on the brittle, dead-looking grass.

As he passed the houses of friends, John hoped he would see them doing something in their yards, so he could say hello. John walked faster as he passed certain other houses, dreading the idea of being forced to make small talk with the people who lived in them.

The Elsfords’ house remained empty, John saw, and yet still no "For Sale" sign had been posted. It seemed as if a lot of houses in the subdivision were empty, more each month. John could tell the families had moved out because the driveways had no cars, the windows had no drapes or curtains. Sometimes, John would walk up to a house and press his face against the glass. The rooms inside were stripped bare. But there were never any "For Sale" signs out front. And none of the people in the subdivision ever seemed to know why their neighbors had left.

Without realizing he had been planning to do it for several days, John dialed the telephone number for his son, Scott.

"Scott? How are you doing?"

Scott spoke fast, breathless. "Pretty good, Dad. Can I call you back? I’m in the middle of cooking dinner, and I can’t talk just now."

"OK." John hung up the telephone and went over to the easy chair, where he leafed through a magazine he had been meaning to read ever since it arrived two months earlier. Mary called from down the hall, barely loud enough for him to hear. "Was that Scott you just called?"

"Yes." John did not feel like explaining further. His eyes scanned the entire text of magazine articles, but he read none of the words, not even noticing that he wasn’t reading. When he reached the last page of the magazine, he set it down on the floor and wondered what to do next. He looked through the TV listings and didn’t find anything he had heard of, let alone something he wanted to watch. He thought about going down to the bedroom and saying something to Mary, or maybe just seeing what she was doing in that room all by herself. He thought about walking down the hall and kissing Mary on the nape of her neck. He went instead to the bathroom, and he stood in front of the toilet a minute, watching his urine dribble down into the white bowl. He noticed a slight gray ring in the bowl and made a mental note to mention it to Mary.

He returned to the easy chair and picked up the magazine again. He looked at the cover for a while, then stared off into space. The telephone rang. He picked it up but didn’t say anything into the receiver. He waited.

"Dad? This is Scott. Is that you?"

"Yes." John paused for a long time, and then he said, nearly shouting, "Don’t you ever do that again, do you hear me?" He hung up the receiver, his hand trembling.

Mary’s voice drifted toward John from the bedroom, only loud enough for him to hear because the house was so quiet.

"John? Why were you yelling at Scott?"

John went to the bathroom and got ready for bed.

John dreamed again about the moving van. He was getting ready to call the moving company, and Mary said, "Make sure you tell them to come in the middle of the night, so no one will know we’re leaving."

"OK, Mary," he said. "But where are we going? Have you thought about that? Just where is the van going to take all of our things? Just where are we going to live?"

"Don’t worry, John," she said. "Just call the moving company. They’ll figure out everything. Leave it up to them."

When John awoke from the dream, he thought for a moment he heard his wife picking up the telephone, but he jerked his head around and saw Mary lying still in the bed.

John could not fall back to sleep. He squinted to read the time on the digital clock halfway across the room. He thought it said 3:40, but he was not certain. He knew it was dark and it must be the middle of the night, but he felt wide awake. He glanced over at Mary, who barely moved at all when she slept, becoming an inanimate object, a part of the furniture for eight hours every night. John considered brushing his legs up against her or blowing on her ever so slightly, to see if he could arouse her, but it suddenly seemed like such a foreign idea, as if someone had planted it in his head, as if he had never done it before. He did not have a clue as to how to approach her, where to enter her body, which parts of her skin liked to be touched. It was a strange thing to forget, he thought.

It was some time before sleep came again to John. When he slept at last, he dreamed again of waking up in an empty house. This time, he looked with suspicion at the closed door of Larry’s bedroom. He opened the door and saw the room was impossibly crowded, filled with people standing shoulder to shoulder. Some he recognized: Mary, Larry, Scott, the Elsfords, other neighbors who had moved away, people from John’s accounting firm who had left recently for other jobs. They all stood perfectly still, pressing tightly against each other, saying nothing.

When the alarm went off in the morning and John got up to take his shower, he felt as if he had been awake the entire night, staring at the shape of his wife’s back.

One evening, John looked inside the refrigerator and scowled when he saw how much food Mary had accumulated. He counted the bottles of catsup. There were three! She didn’t even wait for them to finish one bottle before she bought another. And there were four loaves of bread, two of them unopened, two half-finished.

"Mary," he said, although she was not in the room. "Could you cut down on your grocery list? We don’t need all this stuff!"

He wasn’t sure if she heard. He went into the living room and turned on the television. He leaned back in the easy chair, absent-mindedly watching a basketball game. John wondered which room Mary was in, but he didn’t feel like getting up to see. He guessed she was in their bedroom. He tried to imagine what she was doing, but as much as he tried, nothing came to mind.

The game was barely past halftime, but John clicked off the TV, went down the hallway and paused in front of Larry’s room, staring at the door. There’s nothing in there but junk, he thought, nothing but junk.

He opened the door and surveyed the items haphazardly scattered throughout the room: a night table, several chairs, some slightly bent curtain rods. He reached down to pick up a box he had retrieved some time ago from the attic, a random assortment of old photographs. John flipped through the pictures, seeing himself in his World War II uniform, John and his sister when they were children, John and Mary taking a car trip to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan after they got married.

Whenever John looked at those pictures from the first days of their marriage, he felt a bit of the same emotions he had experienced back then on the other side of the camera lens. He touched his finger to his wife’s face in a photograph taken on the beach, a picture of them standing together and giggling, Mary’s arm disappearing behind John’s figure. Just looking at the photo, John could almost feel the gentle tickle of her fingers in the small of his back.

John smiled for a moment, then he remembered the last time he had looked through the box. He had felt these same things that time, but when he showed the pictures to Mary, she didn’t even feign interest. "Why do you keep bringing down all that stuff from the attic?" she said. Although John wasn’t finished looking at the photos, Mary took the box and put it in Larry’s room with all of the other junk.

Now John returned the box to its place amid the odds and ends and went back out into the hall. He walked by Scott’s room, almost expecting to see Scott lying there, reading a magazine or doing his homework, his feet dangling past the end of the bed. But instead John saw the room was filled with loafers and wingtips. "When did I get all these goddamn shoes?" he muttered.

The bed was empty  around John. At first, he thought Mary must have gone to the bathroom, or perhaps she was in the kitchen making breakfast. But he didn’t hear the sounds the house made whenever Mary walked, the way the floor would creak under her feet. He didn’t hear much sound at all in the house, besides his breathing. He lay in bed for several minutes, thinking Mary might come out of some hiding place if only he waited. When Mary didn’t appear, he sat up, feeling fully awake.

Mary was not in the house, although he could find no indication of why she had left the house so early. He wondered if she had decided to leave him for good, but there was no note of explanation. Her clothes and personal belongings were still there, and the car was in the garage, so it seemed unlikely she was gone forever. John thought perhaps he should call the police and report her missing, but the idea seemed a bit rash. She had probably just decided to take a walk or something, he thought.

John washed and dressed. Skipping breakfast, he went to the garage and got into the car. He felt distracted and forgot to close the garage door with the remote control as he pulled out of the driveway. He thought it was just about rush hour, but the expressway into the city was totally barren of traffic. John could have driven as fast as he desired, but he slowed down and pulled his car over to the shoulder. He looked across the eight lanes of pavement and the train tracks that ran through their middle. There were no cars or trucks on the highway, and no one waited on the train platform.

John sat on the side of the road, waiting for someone or something to appear, perhaps a motorcade of long black limousines and police cars, flags waving on their hoods, motorcycles pulling up the rear. That would explain it, he thought. They’ve cleared off the highway so the President can get through.

But the emptiness and silence would not let up. Even John’s car radio was quiet, incapable of picking up any stations, just the slightest hum of static, barely audible. John put on his turn signal and got back onto the highway. He came up to the ramp where he normally exited. But John knew there would be no one at the office if he went there. He knew the streets would be empty, and all of the restaurants and stores and all of the houses. He wondered where everyone had gone, why they hadn’t left behind a note or a set of directions so he could follow them.

John drove past the exit ramp and past the downtown, past the suburbs, out into the country where the buildings fell away from the sides of the road and became fields of corn. Still there were no cars, still no people, so he drove faster and faster, and the engine made a whining noise as if it were ready to snap apart. John pressed the accelerator even harder. He was certain that somewhere ahead must lie the place where all of the people had gone.

It was 5 a.m. when Mary noticed how cold her husband’s arm was in the bed next to her. She started, recoiling her fingers, but then a calmness came over her. She picked up the telephone and called for an ambulance, and then, as the paramedics were taking John away, Mary phoned Larry and Scott and told them the news. She asked herself if she was supposed to cry now, or whether she should wait until the funeral. She wished she’d had a chance to say something to John before he died, but she wasn’t sure what she would have said.

Mary stood in the hallway as she waited for whatever was supposed to happen next, looking into Scott’s room at the shoes, the brown and black loafers dropped in random directions. She felt a twinge of guilt. She realized she was already planning how she would store her old dresses in Scott’s closet now that John didn’t need it anymore. Mary went inside Scott’s room and placed the shoes in neat and straight rows, as if it would make a difference.