Taxi Cabs

Throngs of people bustled around importantly, everybody huffing at everybody else as if the existence of other people was a dreadful inconvenience. I sat silently on one of the high wooden benches, clutching a plain brown purse, my knuckles growing whiter by the second. The orange Taxi Cabs sign glared at me, daring me to enter the portal beneath and find a ride.

“The California Zephyr will depart in 15 minutes from Platform C.”

That was my chance. I wasn’t destitute. I had a job back in San Francisco, if I wanted. They’d take me back.

Unlike the people here. “Welcome to Omaha” read the flyers. I sniffed in derision. Four years ago I had done whatever it took to get out of Omaha. It snowed – as I sat in the station, drifting flakes contributed to the two feet already on the ground – all winter. The summers were stifling. Nothing ever happened. The city was small, surrounded by an ocean of farmland on all sides. Nobody cared about Omaha.

When I walked out the house that day, sold brown suitcase in hand, I swore I would never come back. My ticket to San Francisco was my ticket to heaven. Maybe I’d work my way down the coast and audition for movies or take up surfing near San Diego. After years of working dead-end waitressing jobs, I had enough money to get by for a few months. I brimmed with confidence. No sticker shock was going to surprise me; I’d done my research and knew it was expensive. I was prepared to do whatever to survive, just so long as I never spent another winter in the ice or summer in the oppressive, humid heat.

“The California Zephyr is now board at platform C, departing for Denver, Colorado in 10 minutes.”

Still that orange “Taxi Cabs” sign taunted me.

Nobody was here to pick me up. I hadn’t phoned to say I was coming or anything, ostensibly to surprise them, but really I probably had just wanted to leave myself a way out.

I liked San Francisco. I loved the violent hills, the rapid accents of Chinatown, the salt air, the fishiness of the wharf. I loved the people with their easy smiles and laid back air, as if tomorrow didn’t matter because it didn’t exist. The high drug use among a lot of the people I met probably accounted for a good portion of this lackadaisical air. The first few times I’d been offered drugs I said no on account of my midwestern scruples. When I finally gave in and smoked a joint, it repulsed me so much I couldn’t look at any drugs thereafter without my stomach going all queasy and threatening to dance back out of me.

It was hard to make friends after that, at least among my fellow waitresses. Then I got a job working as a receptionist at a little art museum. It was a step up in pay and prestige. None of the snobby patrons really cared about me, but some of the struggling artists who came in hoping to get their work displayed in the rotating collections were nice. I even moved in with one: Lisa Petrelli.

She was from the area, a neo-hippy and art freak. She could behave temperamentally at times but excused it all in the name of her art. There was no doubt she was good, though. Her paintings were wild, sweeping, hazy. You could always tell what they were supposed to be, in spite of the long, crazy brushstrokes.

Those paintings were the beginning of my desire for home. The openness of them reminded me of the broad, sweeping fields of Nebraska and Iowa. She meant them to evoke the ocean, but the ocean seemed limiting to me. In the open fields you could run forever; you could only go so far into the ocean before you died.

The other factor that resulted in my sitting in the train station indeterminately walked into my life three years after I moved to San Francisco. Jerry was a quiet young engineering student at the university. He came down to the gallery every week, sometimes sitting for hours at the same bench, doing homework. For some reason, he felt like he could concentrate surrounded by the art. He was also the only visitor who gave me the time of day. On slow days, I’d sit next to him and he’d tell me about the paintings, and later about what he was working on and his hopes for the future.

He had brown eyes like a doe and towered above me at six-foot-three. Jerry hated haircuts and his blond waves always dangled in his eyes and curled around his ears. I fell head over heels in love with him. But I was too shy to ask to see him outside of the gallery and he never offered. He graduated in December, that much I knew. After graduating, he just never showed up again.

Tears stuck in my eye and I felt stupid for it. They glowed orange from that stupid sign. Taxi cabs.

“California Zephyr departing from Platform C in 5 minutes.”

I was here for my father. In high school when a loser that he’d warned me not to date and gone and done exactly what losers do and dated three other girls besides me, my dad was there to hold me and love me. When I left the house, he was the one who gave me $20 just in case. He was the one who wrote letters instead of just calling. My whole life, he’d never given up on me.

The orange glow faded as my father’s face drifted before me. My mother had been upset when I’d left, my brothers had called me a traitor. My dad had been silent. I wasn’t afraid of his welcome. He would love me and hold me and it would be okay.

In spite of the bustle around me, silence filled my mind. Peace. I would go home to my dad. It would all be okay. Maybe someday I would go back to San Francisco.

I stepped into the orange light, through the door and hailed a taxi.


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